


Of Crosswalk Guys and Things That Go Bump in the Night

by Seaward



Category: Signs of the Times (Public Art in Emeryville)
Genre: Chocolate, F/M, Mages, Magic, Original Fiction, Werewolves, book group - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-26
Updated: 2013-12-26
Packaged: 2018-01-06 06:42:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 47,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1103677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seaward/pseuds/Seaward
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An original story (with many elements from fandom) in which the main character has no idea what she is or what is going on as she runs into what might be werewolves, mages, or generally quirky people. Meanwhile, something unusual seems to be "starting up" in Emeryville, CA with suspicious occurances involving "Signs of the Times" public artworks (pictured at: http://here2day.netwiz.net/seyedsite/publicart/signsofthetimes/signsofthetimesframe.html).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Crosswalk Guys and Things That Go Bump in the Night

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Linda for some beta reading, but any remaining mistakes are definitely mine. Thanks to the City of Emeryville for awesome public art and occasional chocolate. The orginal draft of this story was written for Nanowrimo 2011, although it evolved a bit since then.

Wednesday

It started before the crash.  Something changed inside me when I saw the crosswalk guy juggling three heads.

A bit flipped.  I didn’t laugh out loud, but a part that had forgotten briefly remembered.  Sitting at a stoplight, alone in my car, I thought, “Celia, you’re not in Seattle anymore.”

It wasn’t as if the white stick figure in the crosswalk signal was different.  In fact, it was exactly the same as in any other walk signal in any other city.  But the first person to welcome me to Emeryville, California was that well known crosswalk guy, painted almost life size on a utility box, a big yellow cabinet that controls traffic lights and so on.   

The enlarged image showed him juggling three heads, or maybe three circles, one of which might be his head.  That walk signal guy juggled the heads while balancing on a board on top of a clock, and I thought, “I know exactly how that feels,” and also, “I have no idea what that’s about.”

Then the safe fell on my car.  The windshield shattered into shards like rock salt, but none of them fell in on me.  They broke my view of the crosswalk guy into bits, and I stared at the big metal cube of the safe, like a die thrown by a giant, resting deep in the hood of my little white Fiat.

I didn’t scream.  I didn’t shake, not immediately anyway. 

I was wrapped in cotton, cold cotton, like an anesthetic.  Looking up, there was no place a safe could have dropped from.  There were three story high buildings on each side, but a sidewalk separated the nearest from me.  Could a safe have flown out over the sidewalk?  Who could throw a safe that far?

I’d forgotten how these things used to happen.

In college I was struck by lightning— twice.

At my first real job interview, I was wearing molecule earrings designed by the interviewer’s niece.  I got the job.

The interviewer’s niece later ran off with my boyfriend in the Toyota wagon he and I had named Sneaker.  I got fired.

When I replaced it with the Fiat, back in my twenties, I bought and named the car myself, even though I was already dating Lance. I named my new car Roadrunner.  I never should have named the car Roadrunner.  Anyone might expect a safe to fall on Roadrunner.

A woman came running out of that nearest building.  Her clothes were tight and her skin the color of toast.  Behind her came a big man, as deep brown as extra dark chocolate.  Maybe he could throw a safe.

The woman ran up to my passenger door shouting, “You alright?”

I was leaning over to roll down the window when a police car with siren blaring pulled up behind me.  My brain, in some slow, cautious fog, told me I should stay in my car until the officer came to me.   I rolled down the passenger window anyway, then the one on my side.  Only after that, did I remember to put the car in park.  I didn’t turn it off, because I thought the cops might want to know it was still running.  Even as I thought it, the engine sputtered and died.

A black cop, somewhere between the colors of the man and woman on the sidewalk, came up to my driver’s side window.

“What happened here?”

I stared through the shattered glass in front of me and said, “I think a safe fell on my car.”

The officer looked at my car and the shiny metal safe settled in the dent on my hood.  Then he looked up and over at the couple on the sidewalk. 

“You two see it happen?” he asked.

The man crossed his arms and took a silent step back.  The woman swished her head back and forth, as if looking for someone else to answer.  Jutting her chin back at the quiet man, she said, “It’s his safe.”

The officer raised one eyebrow and the woman repeated the whole looking around gesture before saying, “He lives up there on the third floor, and he wouldn’t tell me what was in it.”

The man didn’t react, and the woman shouted angrily at him, “Pissed me off, so I shoved it out the window.”

The police officer did blink at that.  He looked at her beside the big man, probably wondering like I was if she really had the strength.  But she wasn’t a small woman, probably taller than me and slightly larger in every other way.  I looked again at the safe.  It wasn’t all that big really.

The cop walked back to his car and talked into his radio.

I looked at the utility box with the painting of the crosswalk guy, juggling his heads while balancing on the board atop the clock.  What if the stick figure from the crosswalk signal had to come out at night to change the bulbs in traffic lights?  Then the other circles he was juggling could be lights, as could his head.  If the drawing were in color, would the circles be green, yellow, and red?

Minutes passed.  The cop came back and took my registration, insurance card, and driver’s license.

An ambulance showed up, and some EMT asked me a lot of questions before having me get out of the car so he could look me over.  I can’t remember if it was the EMT or the cop who asked where I was going, if there was someone who could come get me.  I ended up showing both of them the paper I’d scrawled my new address on.  It had Judy’s name and phone number, although I’d never met or spoken to her.

Someone must have called, because she drove up a few minutes later in her big American car.  She parked just behind the crosswalk guy’s yellow box.  Pulling herself out of the car, Judy was enormous, easily three hundred pounds.  She made the woman who’d pushed the safe out of the window look shapely if not petite.

Somehow Judy took charge and brought all my stuff back to her car.  She seemed collected and reasonable, not that I was in a state to know.  When the time came, she took me to her car, turned the ignition, put the car in gear, and ran straight into the yellow box with the crosswalk guy.

I guess it was convenient that the cops were still right there.  I don’t remember the whole thing clearly, but I guess she’d put the car in forward instead of reverse.  It still worked, as did the streetlight, so I guess  things could have been worse.  The crosswalk guy wasn’t even damaged, just the back of his box.

I don’t know what happened to my car, but I think I must have had a concussion or something.  Judy kept waking me up to check on me all night, asking how I felt and shining a flashlight in my eyes.  I’m assuming the EMT told her to do that, otherwise this whole roommate thing is going to be weird.

 

Thursday

There were kitchen-y sounds, the best alarm clock in the world.  I pulled myself out of bed into a square of light from the window and thought maybe life could be okay after all. Still in my clothes from the day before, I padded out to Judy’s kitchen—our kitchen, I guess.

“Hey, you’re up.”

She was wearing a loose floral dress, or maybe it was a nightgown.  The word “housedress” came to mind, but I wasn’t even sure what that was.  She poured two cups of coffee and shooed me over to a dinette table just off the kitchen.  I lifted the mug she gave me, as if to take a sip, but just inhaled the scent and steam.  I like the smell of coffee.  I love the feel of a warm ceramic cup in my hands and steam on my face.  But I’ve never put in the time to get used to drinking the stuff.

“Don’t talk much, do you?” she asked.

“I guess I lost the habit.”  My voice sounded small.  I felt about twelve years old with this huge, motherly woman sitting across from me.  Looking at the jowls hanging from the bottom of her face and the wrings of flesh and wrinkles around her eyes, I wondered if Judy was really that much older than me.

I’m forty, but it doesn’t mean much to me, and other people used to always assume I was younger than my age.  But I haven’t been around people much the last few years.  It’s hard to know what they’ll think of me now, let alone for me to try to interpret them.

When Lance and I got married, we bought a house on the Olympic peninsula across from Seattle.  We both managed to telecommute for more than a decade.  At first I thought we were lucky, not having to deal with cars or crowds.

“Been living alone?”

“No, I was married.  We just didn’t talk much.”  That’s an understatement.  Lance and I reached a point where we never spoke unless someone else was around, which wasn’t often.  When it finally occurred to me to talk to him about why we weren’t talking, he said we didn’t have anything to talk about.  Is that reason enough to leave a husband?

The toaster popped and Judy fetched us each a piece of thick bread with raisins and nuts in it.  She didn’t offer any butter.  Maybe she’s on a diet.  I took a bite, and it was the best bread I’d ever tasted, with a little bit of stretch, even though it was toasted, and a little bit of texture, even beyond the nuts and raisins.

We didn’t talk while we ate.  We didn’t talk until I asked, “Did you make this?  It’s amazing.”

Judy shook her head.  “My friend Emma makes it; gives me a loaf every week.  So seriously, do you feel okay?  I think you were in shock yesterday.”

From what I knew about shock, the EMT must have checked for it and wouldn’t have let me go if I’d had symptoms, but people sometimes use the word for something much smaller.  “Did the EMT tell you to wake me up at night?”

“They said it was okay to let you sleep, so long as you weren’t too hard to wake up.  So waking you up was the only way to check.”

“And the flashlight?”

“I saw that on TV, to make sure the pupils are the same size.”

The ambulance guys must not have thought I was in shock or concussed or anything else.  Why should I be?  A heavy object fell on my car while it was stopped at a stop sign.  We ran into a utility box at low speed.  I’d probably experienced worse impacts on roller coasters.

“What happened to my car?”

“They took it as evidence, along with the safe.”

“But what am I supposed to drive?”

“The cop seemed to think you could replace it for less than the cost of repairs.  There’s some paperwork over there,” she pointed to an overflowing side table.  I looked around the room.  Most horizontal surfaces were stacked high with stuff, but the stacks looked tidy enough.  “You might need it for dealing with insurance.”

“Does insurance cover a safe dropping on my car?”  It seemed as profound as any question in my present life.

“Huh, either way, I think the people who dropped the safe would have to pay, but then you might have to wait ‘til the case goes to court.”

“Court?  They aren’t going to expect me to testify, are they?”

“Probably.  They mentioned charges like reckless endangerment.”

I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to press charges.   Not that I approved of people pushing safes out of windows, but they clearly hadn’t meant to hurt me.  They just hadn’t thought it through.  Could you charge someone with being criminally thoughtless?

Besides, I might be walking by that apartment on my way to work.  Who wants to meet their neighbors in court?

“Marlene says you don’t have to come in today, or tomorrow either if you’re not up to it.”

I’d forgotten about Marlene, my new boss, the college friend who’d founded a start up and invited me to Emeryville without a job interview after we hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years.  Marlene had also found me this apartment share with Judy, who was evidently her husband’s mother’s little sister, also divorced.  I wasn’t yet used to being categorized as divorced, and it was strange to think that Judy and I were supposed to have something in common because of it.

Not having worked at an actual brick-and-mortar workplace in the last decade, the idea that I was supposed to be at work today hadn’t really made it through my mind.

“What time is it anyway?”

With a glance to a clock on the counter, Judy said, “Seven AM.”

“Do you know what time she’d expect me if I am going in today?”

“Maybe eight or nine,” Judy gazed intently at my eyes, as if she was checking my eyeballs to see if they were the same size.  “Honestly though, you don’t seem quite right, and you haven’t even touched your coffee.”

“I don’t drink coffee, sorry.  But the bread was lovely.”

 

Friday

With the ridiculous non-disclosure agreement I signed, I’m not sure I can write anything about work except the name, BioSign.  I think they only let us share the name because they assume it will change by the time we go public or if we’re bought out.   And they need something to put on the mailbox.

After two days, I’m still not sure I understand what the company does, or how they expect to make a profit. The phrase “off label genetics” stuck in my head, but no one really explained it. 

The part they want me to do works fine.  It’s not so different from being a contractor really.  I do my part alone.  Besides Marlene, I’ve only met one of the other six employees.

When I showed up at the front glass doors at 8 AM yesterday, they were locked and the building was dark.  Luckily, there was the stenciled logo saying “BioSign” above the mail slot.  Otherwise, it was just a nondescript cement block building by the railroad tracks.  The front glass door looked in on a beige carpeted entryway with a tall beige counter beside an interior door.

I waited fifteen minutes, and the first person to show up was Marlene.  She wore a pinstriped skirt and business jacket with black high-heeled shoes.  I’d put on my best khakis and a striped blouse, so at least we both had stripes.

“Hey, Marlene,” I called out.  “I wasn’t sure what time to show up.”

“Sorry, I was going to phone you later.  Didn’t Judy tell you to take the day off?”

“She said I could, but why?  I’m fine.”

Marlene gave me one of those light hugs that people give friends they don’t really know at all.  Then I followed her in and was shown to a cube.  At least it was blue and not beige.  She brought me the non-disclosure agreement, two technical manuals, and a key card for the front door.  “This will probably be more than enough for today.  I have a meeting in the city, but Don will come in sometime.”

That was the whole interaction.  She was out the door again within the hour.  Don didn’t show up until almost noon.  When he did, he peeked into my cube as if it had previously been an empty cage at the zoo and I was some new kind of monkey.

“Hi,” he said, and then was gone.  I had an impression of dark hair and granny glasses.  No stripes.

I tracked him down before I left for lunch.  His cube is on the far side of the office from mine, but it’s not a very big office, just the entryway, Marlene’s office, and six cubes, only two of which showed real signs of habitation, even through the others had computers and staplers and such.

“Are you, Don?” I asked.

When he nodded, I said, “I’m Celia.”  When he didn’t respond I asked, “Is everyone else at the meeting with Marlene?”

“No, they don’t show up much.”  He spoke with eyes glues to what looked like a financial spreadsheet on his computer screen.  There were earbuds in his ears, and his head jutted forward.

“Would you like to go out for lunch?” I asked.

“No, I eat here.”

That was pretty much all the excitement of my first day on the job.

Today Marlene didn’t even show up.  My only interaction with Don was when he showed me where office supplies are kept.  Now I can help myself to all the staples my stapler can eat.  However, I got far enough into the technical manuals to figure out what I’m supposed to be doing.  It looks pretty interesting, but that’s about all I can tell anyone.

I like walking to work and back, and I do walk by the safe-spitting apartment and the crosswalk guy who juggles three heads.

                       

Saturday

I don’t know what I went looking for.  Our apartment was empty, and it felt like time to be out.  I found another painting of the crosswalk man.  Just a couple of blocks from my new home, he stands gazing at a circle in his hand, once again painted large, in black on yellow.  The circle this one holds isn’t filled in like his head, making for a more peaceful image right away.  He might have just caught a rubber ball thrown by a child or be seeking his fortune in a crystal ball.  I wondered what I’d see Crosswalk Man doing next as I made my way around a flesh and blood homeless woman’s grocery cart piled high with odds and ends.

The bag lady pulled an umbrella from her collection of Gap bags, take out cartons, and bubble wrap.  It hadn’t occurred to me to bring an umbrella.  As I glancing up at the half cloudy, barely gray sky, I didn’t believe I’d need one.  With a nod, I passed the woman by and opened the glass door to Starbucks. 

It clearly wasn’t the place to be on a Saturday night, and it took no time at all to acquire a tall hot chocolate and a single seat facing out through large windows onto the street.  I bent down to plug in my laptop and discovered that the window trim ran just above the outlet.

Since buying my current laptop, I’d had a few opportunities to be annoyed that the plug flips out of a two-and-a-half by two-and-a-half inch box.  However, I’d never before been someplace where this completely prevented plugging it in, so I hadn’t sought out an extension cord.  I’d known it was a poor design, and now I had proof.  The lower plug was already taken by the man at the next little table, whose laptop had a sensible, normal sized plug that would have been fine in the upper outlet.  Still, it wasn’t his fault that my laptop designers had thought themselves into a box, and I wasn’t going to ask him to trade outlets.  My battery would last at least an hour, and the screen would be only a little bit dimmer.

I put the cord back in my shoulder bag and opened the slightly dimmed screen.

“I can move my cord,” the man next to me said.  As he leaned down to do so, a dark wave of hair fell across his forehead.  He flicked it back as he sat up, and his green eyes met mine for a moment.  I couldn’t remember if I’d seen anyone with such green eyes before.  I looked down into my shoulder bag and grasped the computer cord before remembering to speak.

“Thanks.”  If part of why I left my ex-husband was that we’d fallen out of practice at speaking, then I must remember to speak.

I glanced once more at the man before bending to plug in at the outlet he’d freed.  He wasn’t bad looking, maybe mid-forties, not much older than me, slim, maybe a little pale.  And he had amazing eyes.

I clicked and began to type without another word.

“I hope you won’t think I’m rude, but I wanted to complement you on your choice of beverage.  I almost never see anyone else order hot chocolate, especially not on a warm fall night.”

Alarm bells went off in my head.  How did he know what I was drinking?  Had he been watching me since I came in?  Was he trying to hit on me?  Was he some psycho who’d try to slip something into my drink?

My mind was racing.  Maybe I was going crazy, but I’d considered myself crazy too many times before to worry about it now.  Maybe, as the cliché went, I’d just been alone too long, a week or a decade depending on how I counted. 

There was a time when people found me easy to talk to, guys included, whether or not they were hitting on me.  I don’t consider myself to be particularly attractive.  My hair is mousy and my eyes are a faded blue.  But I’m fit and female, and that’s enough to encourage some men.  Was that a bad thing now that I was divorced? 

I never really played the dating game.  I’d gone from groups of friends to boyfriends to marrying someone who’d crossed the line from friend to boyfriend less than a year before the ceremony.  I don’t think I’m naïve, but maybe I am.  I’m not sure anymore.

Once again, I was forgetting to talk.

The man cleared his throat.   “I’m sorry.  I just saw the ‘HC’ written on your cup.”  He turned his cup to show the “HC” scrawled on one side.  I glanced and saw the same notation on mine, probably written by the same barista given the scrawl.  That put his comment more in the category of small talk than creepy predator come on.

I glanced to the counter.  The brown and blue haired barista was wiping it down with a cloth.

A couple worked a newspaper crossword together at another table.  A mom with two girls sat at a larger table, and I wondered if the kids had hot chocolate.  It was a kid’s drink, wasn’t it?  Wasn’t that what most adults thought?  The writing on the kids’ cups wasn’t turned so I could see.  Outside the windows it began to rain, hard.

I glanced back to the man with the hair pushed out of his face.  He was using his touchpad to select another cell on a spreadsheet.  His fingernails were clean, but not perfect, and he didn’t wear any rings.  “I hadn’t noticed the letters before.  I don’t go to Starbucks much.”

“I’m afraid I come here too much,” he said, gesturing at what were probably the remains of his dinner, some kind of toasted sandwich and a salad.  “Can’t say I think much of their chocolate, though.”

“Really?  Is there someplace you’d recommend?”

“Natalie’s, on Hollis.  Have you tried it?”

“No, I’m new to town.”  I knew as soon as I said it, that I shouldn’t have said that.  Even before I’d forgotten how to talk, I’d often been accused of saying the wrong thing, even by people who liked to talk to me.

“Well, you just head down the street, turn left at the new apartments with the metal balconies, and it’s a couple blocks past on your right.”

I didn’t say that I lived in those apartments.  I was just pleased to know that there was better hot chocolate even closer to my new home.  “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

We both settled in to work on our own laptops.  I answered emails from my sister in Sacramento and my niece at Carnegie Mellon.  I didn’t have any interest in my hot chocolate now that I’d heard of someplace better.  The guy next to me didn’t do anything creepy, and I wondered how someone else would have handled the conversation.  I’m not the type to pick up guys at Starbucks, but I couldn’t escape the feeling of missed opportunity.

When he packed stuff into his laptop bag, he said, “I’m Scott, by the way.  Maybe I’ll run into you over at Natalie’s sometime.  They have a special for the last hour each night, three candies and a hot chocolate for ten dollars.  It’s a good way to try things out.”

I’d moved here intending to try new things, so I decided I could tell him my name.  “I’m Celia.  What time do they close?”

“Seven most nights.  Nine on Fridays and Saturdays.  I’m thinking I’ll go by there now.  You’re welcome to walk along with me if you want.”

I glanced at my watch.  Was it really almost eight?  It hadn’t even been dark when I came to Starbucks, definitely before seven.  I touched my hot chocolate, now slightly warm chocolate.  I’d never even tasted it.  But I’d had Starbucks chocolate before, and it wasn’t much as chocolate went.  Natalie’s might not be any better, but I really wanted chocolate by then.  If Scott were a woman, I knew I’d gladly agree to walk to Natalie’s, even though we’d just met.  Part of me thought it was ridiculous to deprive myself of chocolate just because Scott was a guy.  I’d taken self-defense.  Of course, the first rule I’d learned was to avoid bad situations.  Then again, I was never one to avoid opportunities just because I was female.

“Sure, why not?” I said, and then I ignored all the answers my brain provided. 

The rain outside had faded to a drizzle.  The homeless woman had moved into a doorway across the street and clutched her umbrella close above her.

I asked Scott, “Can you wait just a sec?”  Then I ran across the street and offered my untouched hot chocolate to the bag lady.  She looked at me with half shut eyes, peeking out from beneath her umbrella like a cat from under a sofa.

“I didn’t even drink from it, and it’s still a little warm,” I said.

“Chocolate?  I like chocolate.”  The woman spoke slowly and reached slowly out to take the cup, but she drank from it straight away and smiled.

I dashed back towards Scott.  As we walked down the block, past two restaurants and a sandwich shop, he said, “That was nice.”

“I didn’t want to throw it away.”

“Hopefully Natalie’s won’t disappoint.”

We talked about chocolate the rest of the walk, and I felt safe enough and didn’t worry about saying the right thing.  Scott’s hair curled becomingly in the drizzle.  I was sure I looked like a drowned rat.

By the time I finished a ginger truffle, a dark chocolate pecan turtle, and half a cup of very strong chocolate, I was floating in chocolate nirvana and my hair had dried out.

There weren’t any tables with a street view at Natalie’s, so we sat at a polished black counter that faced into the candy making kitchen.   No one was working there at night, but I could imagine how on weekdays people might sit and sip their chocolate while watching the tempering machines turn and the chocolate molds ride along conveyor belts.  It was an artisan shop, not the kind with a dozen single source, high cacao percentages to chose from, but fair trade and organic none the less.  The shop had its own specially milk and dark blends, and they made them into dozens of different candies and two types of hot chocolate. 

I chose only dark chocolates, and each was lovely to look at and well worth eating.  Scott chose dark chocolates, too.  At first we spoke only of what we were eating, and it was surprisingly easy for me to remember how to converse.

“I’m not much for housekeeping or cooking,” Scott said, “but I like to make dessert.”

“What do you make?”

“Cookies, meringues, candies, cakes.”

“What’s your favorite?”

“I don’t think I have one.  Wedding cakes are the most challenging I suppose.”

“You make wedding cakes?”  I wondered for a moment if anything touching on weddings was a safe subject to discuss with a man I’d just met.  But I ignored the thought along with others buzzing in my head, thoughts like, “Why is it so easy to talk to this guy?  Is it just me?  Is it him?  Is it chocolate?  Can anyplace be better than a room that smells like chocolate?  How does this place stay in business when they’ve only had one other customer since we came?  What if the walk signal guy was made of chocolate?”

“I was one of seven kids, and no matter how big of a cake I made, there were never any leftovers.  So when I was about twelve, I made a three tiered cake for my sister’s birthday.  We ate the third tier the next morning after breakfast.  With that much cake, I had to learn how to decorate.  I made a cascade of flowers on a four tier cake for my parents’ twentieth anniversary.  So by the time my friends started getting married in college, I was ready to make their wedding cakes.”

“Do you do that professionally?”

“No, just as my gift to couples I know.  Most days, I’m a computer programmer.”

I couldn’t contain a small laugh.

“What?”  Scott’s whole face opened up when he asked.  His eyebrows lifted, his teeth were apart in his smile, and his dimples shifted back.  His smile wasn’t as stunning as his eyes, but it was comfortable.

“It just seems like everyone I know becomes a programmer.  I have friends who majored in planetary science and chemical engineering who ended up as programmers.”

“And you?”

“Biotech.  I’m only half cursed.”

“Well, I do some hardware, sometimes.  Maybe I’m only three-quarters cursed.”

A cute geek who would talk with me, I didn’t know what I’d stumbled into.  The woman from the register came by wiping down already clean tables.  My watch showed it was almost nine.  I drank the last of my hot chocolate and started in on my last candy, a caramel covered with dark chocolate and sea salt.

“Did you move here for a job?”

“Yep.  My friend Marlene, from college, has a not quite start up.  I’m still not sure if she really wanted me or just someone to share an apartment with her recently divorced aunt.  I guess she leased the apartment to her aunt based on alimony she was supposed to receive.  But the ex has disappeared, the aunt does secretarial work from home and can’t reliably pay, but she’s a relative so Marlene can’t really kick her out.  So Marlene offered me a job and half of an apartment.”

“Your friend from college is now your boss and your landlord?”

“You think that’s weird?  She occasionally dated my ex-husband before I married him.”

He laughed and shook his head.

I nodded, feeling like I’d told too much, about my job, where I lived, my divorce.  “What about you?  How’d you end up in Emeryville?”

“I grew up in Berkeley.  There wasn’t far to go.”

I nodded.  Emeryville was a little tiny town sandwiched between Berkeley and Oakland.  I shouldn’t have assumed Scott even lived here, but he did, and now I wondered where.

The woman from the register had finished cleaning and flipped a sign on the door from “open” to “closed.”  I glanced at my watch, and it was in fact nine o’clock.  I didn’t want to ask Scott for his number, because there was no way I’d ever call.  It just seemed too soon for the shop to be closing.

We both gathered the bags with our laptops and shuffled outside.  The rain was pouring down now.  The two of us barely fit in the dry space under the awning.

Scott glanced at his laptop case, just a light nylon bag, and I wondered how waterproof it was.   My own bag was thick enough to survive a short jog home.  “How far do you have to go?”

“Half a mile.”

I knew before I said it that I shouldn’t.  “You could come to my place for a bit.  It’s only a couple of blocks.”

He smiled and waited, as if giving me a chance to reconsider.  My brain was so startled by what I’d done that it was silent for once.  Then he smiled like we’d reached a warm hearth already, “That’s very nice of you.”

“This way,” I led him at a quick trot into the rain, and when he kept up easily, I jogged a little faster. 

Neither of us had so much as a sweater, so we raced through the rain in our tee shirts, arms clutched protectively over our laptops in their not so waterproof bags.  I felt each raindrop hit my face, even as the top of my head seemed deluged by a sheet of water.  Thinking I should be miserable, my stomach and skin were gleeful as kids in a puddle.

In the shelter of my apartment house porch, I swiped my keycard.  “I don’t even know your last name,” I said, and then kicked myself, because the words implied this was somehow serious.  Not just coming in out of the rain.

“Adams,” he said.

“Mine’s Morales,” I offered as I led him up the stairs, and it felt more intimate to give my name than to invite a strange man into my apartment.  Why had I asked?  What was I doing?

Once inside I found my spare bath towel so Scott could dry his hair and his computer case.  I only had two, so I had to grab my own towel out of the bathroom to dry myself and my stuff.  I’d given up on my hair, but looking down the phrase “wet tee shirt” rang in my ears.

“Be right back,” I said and ran to my bedroom for a dry tee shirt and sweater.  While I was there I sent a quick email to myself titled, “If anything bad happens.”  I wrote, “I’ve invited a man named Scott Adams in out of the rain.  He’s about six feet tall, slim, dark hair.  Someone at Starbucks or the cashier at Natalie’s could probably give a description.”

Then I went back to Scott.  As he pulled my spare towel from over his head, I was caught again by his piercing green eyes.  How could I have forgotten those eyes?

“I’d offer you hot chocolate, but—“

“I think I’ve had enough.  Maybe some water?”

So we drank tap water and sat at opposite ends of the sofa.  The rain thudded against the roof, but the apartment was warm and dry.  By ten o’clock, Scott’s black tee shirt was dry and no longer clinging to his chest.  He stood saying, “I should probably be going.”

He walked to the window and pushed aside the gauzy white curtain that blocked nothing.  A sudden flash of lightening outlined his profile in silver and the wind blew the rain straight against the glass, twice as loud as it had been on the roof.

Scott stepped back dramatically, raising his eyebrows in more than real surprise.  “If the lights go out, I’ll know we’ve passed into a movie cliché.”

The lights went out.  Both of us laughed until our eyes were wet.

“I don’t think I even brought a flashlight.”

“And your housemate?”

“Out of town for the weekend, and I don’t know where she keeps things.”  The stupidity of saying my housemate was gone hit me like a falling safe in a Roadrunner cartoon.

Scott must have noticed, because his faint outline in front of the window seemed to stiffen, and he said, “I should go anyway.”

He should have, but first I made my way to the window.  As far as I could see everything was dark.  The streetlights and traffic lights were out, too.   The rain pounded like _Stomp!_ on tour. It seemed wrong to send even a male semi-stranger out into that.

“Sit.  There’s a candle on the mantle.  Maybe there are matches.”

“I have a lighter,” he said, and crossed the room with more agility than I’d have managed.  He lit the small white candle in its etched glass votive holder.  It lit his face and chest but made the rest of the room seem darker.

I asked, “Do you smoke?”

“No, I used to be a Boy Scout.  Be prepared.”

I couldn’t help wondering what else he kept in his pockets and was glad the darkness hid my blush.  We stood in silence a little too long I guess.

“I’m not sure if I’m intruding here.  You seem to be sending mixed signals.”

“Am I?” I wanted to know how he saw me.  I’d so often been told that I was odd, geeky, or nervous, and yet I’d always had friends when I was younger.  How could this work, starting over at forty?

Scott crossed the dark room again to stand on the other side of the window.  “Right from the start, you seemed uncomfortable when I commented on your hot chocolate, but when you look directly at me, you’re so confident and present.”

Had I once thought of myself as confident?  Not recently.  I could have spent half an hour trying to understand what present meant in this context, though I liked the way it sounded.  I felt present.  Despite being not at all like myself, this evening felt more real than most of my recent life.

Remembering the need to speak aloud I said, “This is new to me.  I’m trying to reinvent myself, I guess.”

“Why do you need reinventing?”

“I was forgetting how to talk.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Isn’t that more clichéd than the lights going out?”

“Depends on what you say.”

He motioned back to the sofa, and we sat again, a little bit closer than before.  When I didn’t start, he said, “What do you mean you’d forgotten how to talk?”

“Well, I’d been married for eleven years.”  Rule number one was “don’t talk about your ex,” but how else could I explain?  “He was a nice guy.”  That sounded pathetic.  “He was a really kind, well-meaning person.  But after a while, it was easier not to talk.  Everything was very smooth and non-confrontational if we didn’t ask each other questions or tell each other what to do.  We were both working from home in the far suburbs of Seattle, and yet, we could go hours without a word.  Sometimes he’d disappear for hours without saying where he was going.  I wouldn’t even know he’d left until I looked for him.”

“Did you have other people to talk to?”

“I guess.  We’d have friends over a couple times a week.  I’d see neighbors out walking or when I ran errands.  There are people I keep in touch with online.”

“But?”

“I don’t know.”  I did know.  I’d thought about it in silence for years before getting divorced, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to explain to this man.  Sure, I liked him.  His eyes seemed to draw the words out of me, seemed to pull me towards him.

I looked away.

“And now?” he asked, his voice gentle, like he really wanted to know.

“Now?” I shrugged.  “We divorced, and I needed to get away, to reinvent myself.”

“I hope you won’t mind my asking, but am I the first guy you’ve invited over since your divorce?”

The words “invited over” rang in my head.  We both knew they meant something more.  What were my intentions?  I’d never had a one night stand in my life, never wanted one.  Was that something I planned to reinvent?

“Yes.”  In my head it had been a whisper, but it came out much more confident.

We both sat up straighter, and Scott said, “You know, I’m probably willing to follow your lead here.  But you’ve got to be clear about it.  I consider myself to be a feminist, so I’d rather skip any of that ‘no means yes’ or ‘yes means no’ stuff.” He tilted his head and gave me a froggy smile.

I had no idea what to say.  Even if I knew what he meant, it was one of those moments where saying the wrong thing seemed likely to cause upset, the sort of moment where it was easier to stay silent.

After a while I said, “I may not be great with words, but I’ll try to keep ‘no’ and ‘yes’ clear.”

“I don’t think you’re at all bad with words,” he said. 

The look on his face had to be what he’d meant when he’d said I looked “present.”  I felt like I had his full attention, like I would be seen and heard and given the benefit of the doubt.  I felt like I was falling in love, but I stopped myself.  That would be too much all at once.

“Do you want me to come closer?”

“Okay.”

He raised one eyebrow.  Maybe he’d practiced that look, but it was charming.

“Yes,” I said clearly, and he moved so we were knee to knee.  Then he took my right hand between both of his and began to rub very gently.

“Tell me something you liked when you were a child,” he said.

“Swimming.  I loved the ocean, waves lifting me up, and even pushing against the water in a pool.”  He stroked along my arm, and I wondered if I had been biased to mention something so tactile.

“I ran cross country, partly for the runner’s high, but partly for the feel of wind in my hair,” he said.

“Do you run anymore?”  He looked fit enough, he might be a runner.

“Not seriously, but when I’m on vacation I like to jog in the early morning, get out and really see a place, be a part of whatever’s around.”

“I take walks like that, even when I’m not on vacation.”

“And where did you grow up?”

Like a walk or a jog, we talked about our childhoods.  I told about visiting Hawaii with my grandmother when I was little and helping on election night in Sacramento when I was in high school.  He told about growing from a tie-died, long haired child into a debate team and band nerd.  All the while, our hands were exploring each other, and by the time we talked about college, we were groping each other’s thighs.

“Where were you for undergrad?” he asked.

“Caltech.”

“I knew it!”  The pause of my hand on his leg must have been enough to reveal my confusion.  “I always liked smart women, and you’re modest, too.  Many people would have dropped that name early.”

“It doesn’t mean much to most people,” but I knew I was skirting the truth.  He’d said he was a programmer, and most programmers respected a degree from Caltech.  Maybe I didn’t like living up to a stereotype or maybe I preferred being judged on my own merits, but I tended not to bring up my alma mater unless asked.

“To those of us at Harvey Mudd, it mattered a great deal.  We saw ourselves as Tech’s rivals, but Tech only noticed MIT.”

There was truth to that, but I found it hard to think with his hand creeping past my thigh.  My body shuddered, and he said, “I’m guessing the room where you changed your shirt has a bed that’s more comfortable than this couch.  But you have to tell me if that’s really what you want.”

Words were leaving me again, though I knew all he needed was a “yes”.  What would happen if I didn’t say it?  Would we keep on like this until I changed my mind?  Would he politely stand and say goodbye?  My years of marriage had taught me that foreplay was often better than the main event, but I knew it was time to make a decision.

Maybe it had only been a few hours, but whatever had happened between me and Scott seemed to mean much more than past experience.  I said “yes” and he carried me to my own bedroom, blowing out the candle on the way.

Being carried made me feel silly and decidedly non-feminist, but I also felt cherished and warm.  On the bed, I made a point of pulling his shirt off first, just to make it clear I was taking some initiative.  His chest was almost smooth, less hairy than I was used to.  When I ran my hands down it, he shivered like I had on the sofa.  Soon we were all skin, and I couldn’t have found words if I’d wanted.  If sex had ever been like this before, I’d forgotten.  But how could I have forgotten?

Part way through, my mind almost became coherent.  I realized I could see every line on Scott’s body and the beads of moisture on his forehead.  I glanced to the window to see if the streetlights had come on.  The curtains were mostly closed, and I couldn’t see any light through the gap.  Rain thudded and thunder broke as I listened, but a soft glow still seemed to fill the room with unexplained colors.  I told myself there might be a full moon shining through a gap in the clouds.  It wasn’t really a plausible explanation for the hues I could see in my furniture, boxes, and especially Scott at that moment, but the sight and the feel of him brought my attention back to how amazing the night had become.  I let go of words and gave myself completely to the experience.

 

Sunday

In the morning, pale light streamed through the gap in my bedroom curtains.  No more rain fell.

I reached out, remembering, but the other side of my bed wasn’t even warm.

I pulled on a bathrobe and wandered through the apartment.  There was no sign of Scott.  His clothes, his shoes, his computer were all gone.  A chill crept through me, but my computer, my purse, my housemate’s TV and DVD players were all there.

I looked around again, wondering if he might have left a note or his phone number, maybe on the table, the refrigerator, the front door, my dresser.  I even checked in case he’d keyed it into my phone or slipped it into my purse. I might have worried I’d imagined him, but the door was unbolted, and I knew I’d bolted it last night.

Whatever the procedure for such encounters might be, this didn’t feel right.  It hadn’t been just a one night stand, had it?  Everything we’d talked about had led me to believe—but we’d never spelled it out, never spoken it.

 

By the time Judy came home, I had spent the whole day moping.  I’d pretended I was cleaning, organizing, and doing needful things, but all I could think about was Scott, and what I’d imagined the previous night.  A one night stand had become my magic prince.  The light allowing me to see in the middle of the storm had become an unearthly glow in my memory.

Judy bustled in with a speed and agility hard to imagine of a person her shape.  To call her pear-shaped was probably generous.  I guessed her to be about five and a half feet tall carrying somewhere around 300 pounds.  Nonetheless, she came through the door with two large shopping bags, a rolling suitcase, and a hat box and managed to deposit the suitcase on her bed, the hatbox in her closet, one shopping bag in the kitchen, and one on the dinette table before I managed to move my elbows off her placemat.

There had also been a greeting along the lines of, “Oh!  Celia!  How was your weekend!  I hope you weren’t working.  Did you do anything fun?  Get out and meet anyone?”

Her words spun around in my brain while I was still forming the phrase, “Hi, Judy.”

Then Judy was pulling Tupperware out of the bag on the table, taking the emptied bag to the kitchen, and coming back with plates and forks.  “I brought tofu-ese.  It’s all those animal rescue people cook, but they always have plenty left over.”

“How was the animal rescue event?”  I couldn’t remember if it was a conference, a protest, or some service project, but I figured “event” pretty much covered the options.   Meanwhile, Judy passed me a Tupperware full of something that resembled chow mein, so I served myself a mound.  The taste was someplace between Italian and Chinese, but I didn’t mind.

“Oh, you know, lots of cleaning up cat mess, but we got at least four of those sixty kitties adopted to good homes, and some other families put in applications.”

“Applications?”

“Oh yes.  PAW PAW is very particular about who adopts.  None of those declaw or outdoor cat types.  And we like them to adopt a pair of kitties to play together, unless the cat is older or there’s a special circumstance.  Oh, and we had our annual elections, I’m now Paper PAW PAW.”

“What does that mean?”  I tried to focus on her story, to shift my focus to that moment.

“Mostly that I have to ride everyone to get their newsletter submissions in on time.  Of course, it’s all online, so I don’t know why we call it Paper PAW PAW anymore.”

“If you’re so involved with this group, why don’t you have cats?”

“Allergies.  You wouldn’t believe the drugs I had to take staying in that house.  But I do love cats.  Now, dear, tell me, what’s wrong with you?”

I took some time to carefully chew her noodles.  “Well, I met this guy.”

Judy waited for me to continue.  It was as if the whole world slowed down.

“He seemed really nice, but I guess he didn’t like me that much after all.”

Judy waited.  It was the opposite sort of not talking from what I was used to.  How could I explain what had happened to a woman who had known me less than a week?

“You seem pretty upset,” Judy said, and she waited again.

“I’ve never done anything like this, but it was rainy and the power went out.”

Judy was nodding as if she already knew what came next.

“He stayed the night, but in the morning, he was gone, without a note or anything.  Maybe that’s just how it’s done now.”

“There is no ‘how it’s done now.’  Arrangements between two people should show respect for each of those people.  If he left you feeling bad, then he didn’t do it right.”

But it had felt so right when we were together.  I didn’t know what to say. 

“You know what we need?  We need book group.  Let me call and see if Emma will host.  Emma is always the best host.”  Judy was already up and searching for the phone before she finished speaking.

“Book group?” I asked.

 

“You’ll see.”

 

 An hour later we were approaching a two-story Victorian in the Berkeley Hills.  The yard was three feet high in grasses and flowers aside from a path so narrow that Judy brushed on both sides.  Most of the house was painted gray, with white trim around the windows.  But two gables had curvy trim above them that was painted lavender, and a small attic window had shutters that were painted yellow.

 Judy walked in without knocking and called out, “Emma?”

“Judy!” a voice from down the hall replied.  “I’ll meet you in the reading room!”

I barely had time to take in the entryway with its elaborate coat rack and a sitting room with anatomically explicit art before being whisked into a room where every inch of wall except the doorway was covered in books.  There were no windows, and I thought from dead reckoning that this must be a completely internal room.  The shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling were built-in dark wood and appeared to be old, possibly original to the house.   But the books that filled them were an eclectic mix with a high percentage or garishly covered paperbacks, a few leather bound hard covers, and even some textbooks.   Each shelf also had a brightly colored miniature bungee cord that stretched in front of the books about a third of the way up, and I imagined what would happen otherwise with a room like this in earthquake country.

Judy seated herself in an armchair, of which there were only two.  I plopped myself down on a beanbag and immediately felt twenty years younger.

 A woman with a scarf around her waist and a skirt made of the same fabric bustled in with a tea tray and set it on an end table smaller than the tray.  “Hi, I’m Emma.”  She extended a hand.

“I’m Celia.”

“Welcome, Celia.  Welcome to Neverland.”  She swept her arms in a gesture that might have indicated the room or the entire house.  “I’m leading belly dancing in a little while, but we should have more of the book group by then.”

Belly dancing, that explained it.  If she took the scarf from her waist, maybe dangling it from a hand, she’d be ready to dance.  I nodded, and Emma said, “Have you tried finger painting recently?”

She regarded me seriously until I decided it wasn’t a joke and shook my head.

“I think we should, don’t you Judy?”

“Oh yes, she’s a very quiet sort.”

Then Emma was gone, and I whispered to Judy, “What is this place?”

“It’s Neverland, dear.”  Judy wasn’t whispering at all.  “I’m not sure who started it, but Emma’s been one of the leaders here since at least the ’80s.  Back then the residents seemed to spawn a new religion every month: Neo-paganism, Proto-paganism, Anti-paganism, Hellenism, Classicism, Neo-classicism, Anti-Neo-Classicism and so on until they got to the mens’ and womens’ mystery groups and then various martial arts and yoga.  And now there are some themed groups, the dancers and the digital video folks.  But mostly I think naming groups is out.  We’re sort of old fashioned to even call ours a book group, but nouns are so reassuring.”

While Judy had been listing, a small woman of indeterminate age and uncertain but probably-Asian ethnicity had entered.  She had black hair dyed a surprisingly bright red on top, and her feet were bare and almost black with dirt. 

 “Li Mei!  Meet Celia!”  And as a younger woman with frizzy long brown hair joined us, “Toni!  This is Celia, my new housemate.”

Toni wore a huge skirt that poofed around her like the cap of a mushroom as she claimed the bean bag next to me.

Just then Emma came back with two cafeteria trays, each holding a large shiny piece of white paper and blobs of red, blue, and yellow paint.  She handed one tray to me and one to Toni then returned quickly with more trays and a mysterious metal machine that looked like a cross between a toaster and a frog.  It had large curved haunches on each side, like the legs of a seated frog, and a wire rack jutted out in between like a tongue.  The eyes were two dials, one set to three and the other to seven.

Toni said, “It spits out wet, heated towels when we’re done.”

“Oh, that’s cool,” I replied.

Toni dipped her finger in blue and yellow and started making partly green swooshes, like grass.  The other women, including Emma, were working with their paint, too.

So many times in my life, I had thought I might be going crazy.  Now I felt as if I’d entered the asylum and didn’t know how to fit in.  With one finger, I touched the yellow on my tray.  It was surprisingly cold and thick, not something I’d usually want to touch.  Looping around, I ran my finger through the blue and red.  Then I started to spiral inward.  The paint started to blend and warm up, and suddenly, it felt good.

When my paper was full of curves and color, Emma handed me a towel.  “I have to join the belly dancers now, but it was nice meeting you.”

Rubbing the warm towel over my hands brought me back to the reality of the room.  The other women were chatting about their lives and other people’s.  Judy and Toni had finished painting and were wiping their hands, but Li Mei was still making small dots with her nails in a style more like pointillism than finger painting.  As the women finished, they deposited their dirty towels on a tray and ended with surprisingly clean hands.  I worked the paint out of my knuckles and cuticles until my hands were just as tidy.  By then I could hear belly dancing music from someplace not too distant. 

Li Mei finished up, and the women took turns telling about their paintings.  Li Mei said hers was the eco-system of the city.   Others asked questions and she explained various parts.   Judy said hers showed how a bunch of cats had moved around a room, as if the motion of each was a blurred streak caught on film.   When it came to Toni, she squinted at what she’d made and called it a marshland, so I didn’t feel too bad calling my spirals and blobs a space scene.

The women went on talking about people and politics until Li Mei said, “It’s late, and Celia might need some time.”

“Time for what?” I asked.

“To find your way home,” said Li Mei.

The rest of the women stood up and started saying goodbyes as they drifted outside.  I drifted with them thinking I must have misunderstood.   I followed Judy to her car, but she just shook her head.  “You have to find your own way home the first time.  Trust me.  I got your bread.”  She patted a bundle of cloth tied onto her purse then opened the driver’s side door and got into her seat without unlocking the rest. 

I knocked on the passenger window, but Celia just shook her head and smiled.  Then she drove away.

The street was dark and mostly quiet.  Belly dancing music still came from inside Neverland, and I wondered what would happen if I went back inside, sat in the library, and waited until Emma was done.  It didn’t seem like the right thing to do.

My cell phone and wallet were in my purse.  I could call a cab if I didn’t want to play this crazy game.  The thing was, maybe I did want to play.  The finger painting hadn’t changed my life, but it was better than moping at home.

I started walking as if following the exhaust from Judy’s car.  Part of my mind repeated that I must be crazy, walking alone at night like this in a city I knew just enough about to be worried.  But I took a deep breath, smelled the wet leaf scent of autumn, and felt protected by the old two story homes that lined the street.

I heard running footsteps coming from behind and tensed for just a moment, but looking back, I saw Toni hurrying to catch up.

“Want company?” Toni asked, huffing a little.

“Isn’t that against the rules?”

“Aren’t there enough rules in life without assuming more?”  Toni scooped her cloud of hair up off her shoulders and dropped it behind her back.  She wiped her hands on her skirt as if they were sweaty and plucked at her shirt as well.

The night was surprisingly mild for November, but I wasn’t likely to overheat no matter how far we walked.  More likely I’d be chilled through before reaching Emeryville.  “Any idea how far it is to Emeryville from here?”

Toni shrugged, “I like the night.”

At the next corner I tried asking, “Which way?”

Toni shrugged again, and I opted for downhill.   I knew we were in the Berkeley Hills, and Emeryville lay low and flat by the bay, so downhill seemed good overall.  Staring down the street in front of us, I saw a swath of lights, presumably Berkeley and maybe Emeryville somewhere to the left.  Beyond was the deep dark bay.

An umbilical of light stretched across, a bridge connecting this side of the bay to the other, to San Francisco.  I marveled at how humans could organize and build something that huge.  And yet, here we were, walking across town in the dark for human reasons that made no sense at all.

“Does everyone do this when they join your group?”

“It isn’t so much about joining.” Toni’s eyes darted about as she explored along the sidewalk.

“What then?”

“Well, if you didn’t want to do this, you just wouldn’t be one of us, would you?”

A reply had almost sorted itself in my head when Toni swooped down and said, “Look a squirrel’s tail.”

I shifted to walk around.

“I think they’re pretty.  You like cat tails, don’t you?”

“But what about the squirrel?”

“What about the cat?”

“Huh?”

“I’m assuming a cat ate the rest.”  Toni peered to each side as if expecting to spot the cat in question.  “I see a lot of squirrel tails.  It makes me suspect that part is not worth eating.”

“You think it’s just one cat that does it?”

Toni raised her eyebrows, “Haven’t you seen them other places?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

We walked in silence as the houses we passed became less well painted, but the yards were still pleasant and the leaves mostly raked.  A few homes displayed large compost piles or boxes in their front yards, as if they were a sign of civic pride.

When we passed a house with peeling paint and blaring music Toni said, “Want to stop by the party?”

A few college age guys were out on the porch, smoking and drinking.  Toni dressed kind of young, with her skirt and her wild hair, but the lines around her eyes and mouth made me certain she was at least mid-thirties.  “Do you know people here?”

“No.  I just like watching people at parties.”

My image of Toni moved down a notch on the normality scale, not as if that was necessarily a bad thing.  “I’m not much of a party person, I guess.”

“I used to be like that.  Then I learned to have fun.”

“Maybe I’ll learn in time, but I have a long way to walk tonight.”

Toni watched the party until her head was craned back over her shoulder.  The guys on the porch ignored her, but I relaxed more when the house was out of sight. 

“I learned by watching the happy people at parties.  You have to watch for the ones who really are happy.”

When the ground was mostly flat, we passed what might have been a frat party, except the house said “Clown Clone Co-op” where there might otherwise have been Greek letters.

“This one?” Toni asked.

I shook my head and asked, “How did you get involved with the book group?”

“I just hung around at Neverland until I was asked.”

“What brought you to Neverland?”

“A guy.  He claimed to be a writer, nothing published though.  He had a nice British accent, but it turn out I liked other people at Neverland more than I liked him.”

“Do you live there?”

“No, Emma and her family, well, loosely defined…  Let’s just say I’ve never been adopted.  But they’ll mostly let you hang around, so long as you’re kind of cool.”

I wondered if I counted as even kind of cool.

By now we were walking along a street that could have been pulled out of the sixties.  The homeless people had afros or beads.  A woman in scarves and shawls sold beads and probably would have sold some of her scarves and shawls if asked.  Most of the food places and many of the shops seemed to be open, although it was past nine and possible past ten.

We’d left the smell of fallen leaves behind and now there were faint whiffs of the people passing by.  A few smelled like perfume or something they’d smoked.  Most smelled like humans who hadn’t taken a shower since at least that morning.  I surreptitiously ducked my head and sniffed down at myself, but didn’t think I smelled too bad.  I had at least taken a shower after waking up alone, and it wasn’t as if I’d done anything athletic since then.

“What do you think it means when a guy spends the night but then leaves before the woman he’s with wakes up?” I asked.

“Are you trying to define more rules here?”

“No, just trying to guess someone else’s point of view.”

“Someone you had sex with?”

“Yeah.”

“And he just left?”

“Yeah.”

“Bit late to understand him now, isn’t it?”

“Don’t you ever watch the unhappy people at parties?”

“No, I already understand that.”

We walked for what seemed like hours, until we came to a street labeled Ashby, and I remembered it as one of the freeway exits that could lead to my apartment.  Then we came to Hollis, and I remembered Natalie’s on Hollis.  Was that only the night before?  It would be closed now, but from there I’d know how to get home.

 

After just a couple of blocks, we came to a yellow utility box with the crosswalk guy boldly marked in black.  This one had a piece from a jigsaw puzzle in place of his head.

“I guess we’ve made it to Emeryville.”

Toni didn’t respond.  She glanced down the street to where people crowded the yard in front of another party house.  This time, she looked away quickly.

My eye was drawn the opposite way down the street.  At first I didn’t know why, a dip of the shoulder looked familiar, the way a man with dark hair ducked his head before turning the corner.  

Then as soon as I couldn’t see him anymore, I knew it had been Scott, knew it with a certainty that might count as crazy.  I hadn’t even seen the man’s face.  How could I know? 

Beside me, Toni walked on oblivious.  “That party doesn’t interest you?” I asked.

“Emeryville parties are different.  I wouldn’t go to one here.”

“Why’s that?”

“All sorts of strange people out this way.”

I couldn’t believe anyplace would have a rep for stranger people than Berkeley, but I didn’t comment.  I’d spotted my apartment building and was eager to get home.

Toni followed on my heels as I opened the door and turned on the living room light.  The furnishings were all Judy’s.  Purple sofa, overstuffed chair, dinette, and dancing meercats.

Tony went right over to the meercat toy and poked its belly to make it sing and dance.  She must have been here before.

“I wonder where Judy is.”

“Probably asleep,” Toni spoke as if to the meercat.  “Heavy people sleep a lot.”

Had I been expecting something at the end of the trek?  I wasn’t sure what, but it seemed like Judy should at least have waited up.  I saw the cloth bundle on the table that must have been the bread Judy brought home from Emma.

“Do you want a snack?  Or a ride home?”

“I’ll walk.  There are those parties to go to.”

“Were you just seeing me home?”

“No.  Bye.” 

Tony waved and was out the door before the meercat finished its number.

 

Wednesday

At work, I tried to push through the backlog.  My new task was less biology and more computer model checking than anything I’d done before.   ACT Genes, one of our clients, provided customers with simple, confidential information about their own genetics, or so the brochure claimed.  I had inherited a list of “issues” from a past employee who had mysteriously left without notice.  Some of the “issues” were a couple of weeks old.  Some affected only one ACT customer, others would have affected dozens, but the computer models were supposed to withdraw any information that started to create “issues.”

The best part of the job was solving the genetic equivalent of word puzzles.  If too many snips of DNA were sticking to a chain including AAGCT, it might be because AGGCT or even AAGGCT was also common in the snip.  Most of the time I was dealing with snips 18 bases long, so the “issues” were really much more complicated, and while the computer might sort out likely near-matches, some creativity was involved in rearranging the tests or adding extra steps to catch the near-matches.

Alphabet soup filled my brain as I walked to an Asian grocery store for lunch.  Then the smell of samosas stopped me cold.  There was something deep fried and spicy drawing me into a parking lot with a sign proclaiming “Open House – The Forge.”

An arm with metal bracelets jingled as I was motioned over to a table.  “You need to sign a waiver,” said an older Indian woman in a red and gold sari.

“I just wanted to buy samosas.”

The woman smiled wide enough to show a couple of gold teeth that matched her bracelets.  “Very good.  But then you’ll want to look around our open house, and for that you need a waiver.”

“What kind of open house is it?”

“The Forge has a contract with the Arts Charter School.  The kids are showing off their ceramics, glass, and metalwork today.  But they have classes for adults, too.  Sign, take a wristband, try something out.”

Signing a waiver to get at a samosa seemed like a bit much, but I had promised myself that I’d try new things, so I went along with the procedure.  Soon I had two samosas in a wax paper cone and was inside a warehouse full of noise.

To my left one group soldered stained glass while another presented a power point about glass fusion, melting glass together.  The ceramics area had five people, mostly teens, at wheels, while a group of younger students worked lumps of clay at a table in back.  A young girl with braids was forming antennae on the front of a five inch tall snail.  It looked ready to creep away.

Beyond the snail, older teens and adults were bending glass tubes over open flames.  They wore safety classes, and a thin rope kept spectators at a distance.  The window behind them displayed neon signs, one saying “Forge.”  Beneath the signs were sculptures, mostly abstract, but one was definitely a waterfall and one spiral shape had to be a frog with a top hat.

I glanced at my wristband and wondered what I was allowed to try. 

Spotting a thick mat on the floor, I glanced up and saw a girl arch her back much too far as she spun on a metal hoop.  Beside the mat a grown man was juggling flaming torches.  (At that point I noticed two women in “Forge” tee shirts standing on each side, keeping the space clear for both performers.)

I walked carefully around to a garbage can where I could toss my wax paper and wondered what I would eat next.

“Are you here to help?” a woman about my age with hair back in a messy bun called from an alcove to her right.  The woman had two dozen kids, most of them not yet teens, lined up at two tables with tubs of sand in front of them.

“Uh, I’m just a visitor.”

“Sorry, they said they’d send someone.”  The woman glanced at two boys who’d begun to push each other and they stopped right away.

“What do you need?”

“Someone to help pour wax, keep the kids from getting burned as they pour or by poking their fingers in afterward.”

“I can handle that.”

The woman looked at me as if I’d just stepped out of the wallpaper then said, “Thank.  I’m Ruth.”

“I’m Celia.”

“Okay, everyone,” Ruth’s voice changed as she spoke from someplace farther back in her throat and willed a voice five times as loud, “Navio is going to take the hot pad and oven mitt.  I hand him the very hot wax.”  Navio, looking to be one of the older students present, did as she instructed.  “He pours slowly without overflowing his impression or touching the tip of the pitcher to his piece.  Then he hands me back the wax and gives the mitt and hot pad to the person on his right.”  With that demonstration completed, Ruth nodded towards another container of wax on a hot plate next to more mitts and hot pads.  “Celia will bring wax around at the other table.”

I felt Ruth’s eyes on me as I helped the first student, and then the lecture continued as we both worked our ways around the tables.  “For today, you’re just taking home a wax figure, but if you went on to do lost wax casting, this would be just the first step.  You could form a new mold with your wax at the center.  Then if you melted out the wax and replaced it with say, bronze, you’d have a cast bronze sculpture.”

I’d never thought about how a metal sculpture might be made.  Of course you couldn’t just work metal like clay, but I’d never stopped to think.

“Ouch, ouch, ouch!”  A girl at my table was pulling her entire finger out of the hot wax I’d helped her pour just a minute before.  I took the wax back from the current boy, returned it to the hot pad, and made it back to the girl with wax already drying on her finger.  Instinctively, I reached forward and rubbed the wax off the finger.  Most of it came right off, barely hurting me at all.

Ruth rushed up behind us and took the girl by the shoulders, steering her out of the alcove.  “Everyone stay exactly where you are and don’t touch a thing.”

Suddenly I was alone with twenty plus children and a potentially dangerous craft.  I glanced at one table and then at the other.  Some of the kids began to talk.  One asked me, “What’s your name?”  A couple looked like they would start poking their wax or each other, so I made an executive decision.

“I don’t mind if you talk, but I want everyone to sit down Indian-style on the floor.”

“You aren’t supposed to say ‘Indian,’” a boy who might have been Native American said.

“You’re supposed to say ‘Please,’” one of the smaller girls said.

“Fine.  Please sit down cross legged on the floor.”  It must have been a magic word because everyone sat down.  Some boys started poking at each other, but at least they were out of range of hot wax.

Soon Ruth came back, and the little girl had her finger in a paper cup with water.  Ruth once again surveyed the scene as if children sitting on the floor was not something one saw every day.  For a moment I felt ashamed, as if I’d done something inexplicably bad or stranger than I’d realized.  Then she nodded understanding and said, “Please stand if you have not yet poured your wax.”

I was washed clean by acceptance I hadn’t known I’d been missing.  After that we had each child sit immediately after pouring wax.

When the project was done and the kids had been handed off to their next instructor, Ruth said, “That was good.  Have you worked with children before?”

“No, and I let someone get burnt.”

“Very minor.  You have kids of your own?”

“No, just a niece who visits some summers.  I’m a biologist by day.”

“Oh!  You know anything about DNA?’

“I’m currently working at BioSign.”  Ruth showed no recognition, despite being only a couple blocks from the main office, but she dragged me across the warehouse to where a young Latino man in a muscle shirt stood on a ladder, welding something huge together.

“Hey, Al,” Ruth used her loud voice to be heard over the torch.  Al shut it off.  “This is Celia, she know something about DNA.”

Al stayed on his ladder but flipped his visor up.  He said, “CCGCGGGAGTCGTTGGAGTAC.”

I shrugged and said, “When I was in school we just memorized digits of pi.”

His face was blank as ice.

“So I’m guessing that was either some chunk of your own genome or a published sequence of interest.”

“Presley, Elvis is in the codons.”  He began to flip his visor down. 

“Come on, Al.  Show her your project.  She might be able to help.”

Al came down the ladder with one hand still on his visor and the other carrying his torch, as if he might start welding again at any moment.  But he led us to a back corner where a tarp covered something tall.  He lifted a flap to reveal a welded metal DNA helix wrapped around a stack of metal garbage can’s about twelve feet high.

“Cool,” I said.

Al nodded. “I’m not sure which bases to put inside, coded in lights.”

“Do you want to represent junk DNA, since it’s inside of garbage cans?

“No, that’s not the point.  I need something special.”

“But no one will be able to see it.”

He reached for his visor again.  I took it as the equivalent of rolling his eyes.

“What do you mean by ‘something special’?”

Al raised his eyebrows momentarily, but said nothing.

Ruth put her hand on her hip and said, “How do you expect people to help if you can’t say what you want?”

“When I know, I won’t need any help.”  With that he dropped the visor and walked back to where he’d been working.

I called after him, “Thanks for showing me your work.”

Ruth said quietly, “Well, thanks for helping with the kids.  I have a class Saturdays at ten where I could really use an assistant.  If you’re happy getting paid in classes or shop time, just show up.”

 

 

Friday

Marlene clicked into my cube this morning in high heeled black boots and a plaid skirt.  On her, it looked respectable.  “I have a treat for you.”

I couldn’t tell if her tone of voice was meant to be sarcastic or not.  It sounded straight out of the fifties to me, but I replied in kind, “Oh, really?”

“We have a chocolate lover’s sequence!  Our tech people say it’s ready for our next release.  You get to integrate it into the system and check the results.”

“And it’s an actual sequence we tested for, not just a correlation?”

“We’ll have half the genome in SNiPs by the next release.  The trouble is tagging which ones give us all of an answer, which give us part of an answer, and which are just near enough to an answer to correlate.  This chocolate sequence may be public domain, but we got the whole amino acid, protein, flavinol, neurotransmitter route pinned down first.  If you’ve got this SNiP, then taking in chocolate spits out oxytocin, chemical love.  Doesn’t mean other people don’t produce it some other way or some other SNiP can’t block the effects of this one.  But when we know the chemistry like this, it’s bound to be useful to someone.  Now you just need to integrate and test ASAP.  I’ll send it over.”

I started searching for company procedures on how to integrate a new sequence before I heard Marlene close her office door.

 

Saturday

Back into the giant warehouse called “The Forge,” there were no samosas today.  It was quiet and cold, although a few kids had already found their way to Ruth.  She was using a wire to cut slabs of thick red clay.

“Celia!  You came back!  You might want an apron for this.”  I followed her gesture to a rack on the wall.

Soon I was slicing clay and helping kids roll serpentine coils to make pots while Ruth helped three at a time learn to throw pots on electric pottery wheels.  There were only twelve kids in this class, but with the wheels going, I could see why Ruth wanted an assistant.

At noon the kids went home, and Ruth invited me to a noodle shop.  I glanced back towards the welding corner.   That area had filled during the last two hours as each section of the warehouse had warmed and grown louder.

“Do you know if Al’s here?  I brought a sequence for him.”

Ruth nodded approval and led the way again.  At first there was no sign of Al, but we heard from other welders that he was around and finally found him cleaning equipment in the back.  A couple of other welders also puttering about what appeared to be an equipment room, cleaning room, and first aid station, with bits in bins and hanging on the walls to force organization on looming chaos.

“Hi, Al,” I said as Ruth hung back.

“Hey,” he nodded, barely looking up from his work.

“I found a sequence I thought you might like.”  I unfolded a single piece of paper with CTGAA… printed to cover almost half of it.

“What is it?”

“Something to do with liking chocolate.  The protein produced interacts with the flavinols.  I’m not sure I can say exactly how, since it’s a new find, but the sequence is public domain.”

“Kinda long.”

“Compared to what?”  Many sequences were ten or a hundred times this length.

“Metal.  The scale I’m working can only handle a hundred, maybe two hundred base pairs, tops.”

“You could use a set of SNiPs.”

He shook his head, not as if he didn’t know what a SNiP was, but as if the suggestion he use one was unbearably stupid.  “Look, I don’t need favors from some white, middle class, mom-type.”

“I was only trying to help, and white is a matter of opinion.” I worried it had come out defensive.  As I tucked the paper back in my pocket, I held my silence rather than mentioning that my Dad’s mom was born in Mexico.

“Al,” Ruth’s voice was warning, “We don’t need that kind of attitude here.”

Ruth’s tone of voice sounded a lot more like the white, middle class moms I’d known growing up.

“You can leave me alone, too.  You don’t know half as much as you think.  You don’t know the kind of power I have.”  He said it low and half whispered, like something out of a gangster movie.

“Pa-lease,” said a woman who’d been working at a sheltered workbench with a safety helmet on.  “Keep your religion and your prejudices to yourself.”  As the helmet came off, I saw black hair give way to a shock of red on top.  It was LiMei from the book group.  “You shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, especially if it’s a chocolate gift horse.”

Al slammed his tools down on the table.  “God, it’s like being surrounded by my mother!”  He stormed out of the room, leaving behind the torch he’d been working on.

“At least he didn’t accuse me of being white and middle class.”

I picked up the discarded tool Al had left.  It was heavy and solid in my hand, remarkably self contained and mysterious.

I glanced over at LiMei, “Wow, I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Finger painting to welding in 500 tiny lessons.”  Li Mei went to the sink to wash her hands and said, “Ruth, Celia, lunch?”

At lunch I learned that while Ruth and LiMei had met before at The Forge, they didn’t know each other any better than each knew me.  So over very cheap sushi (I stuck to vegetarian as a precaution), we shared stories of how we came to the Bay Area.  I kept wondering if Ruth would be invited to join the book group, but LiMei never brought it up, so I didn’t either.

After lunch, we went our separate ways.  I didn’t know the shortest route to my apartment, but I was sure that walking back via the Forge would be the long way around.  Besides, it was broad daylight and hot only in the sense of encouraging me to stay outside.

I walked past houses strangely similar to those by Neverland, mostly two story and Victorian.  But here the same houses seemed sad and gloomy.  Paint peeled; roofs sagged.   The grass looked not just dead, but like it would send out runners to kill any living grass.

Then I saw a group of men kicking a pile of garbage.  The men wore saggy pants and tee shirts, like most guys around here.  They were on the far side of the street and were a little more beer bellied than muscular, a little more tough life than tough guy.

Then the pile of garbage struck out with an umbrella.  The umbrella jabbed the leftmost kicker in the shin, and I suddenly realized, _“I know that umbrella.”_  It was another one of those bizarre certainties that made me feel slightly crazy.  Then I realized the collection of items, the take out containers and Gap bags, were the same one’s I’d seen by Starbucks the night I met Scott.  The person wielding the umbrella was the same bag lady I’d seen opening an umbrella that night well before it started to rain. 

Normally, it’s not a good idea to get involved when a group of guys are beating someone up, especially not when out walking alone in an unfamiliar neighborhood. 

I pulled out my cell phone and dialed 911.  I heard a recorded voice just as one of the men shouted, “Hey, what are you looking at.”

“I have no idea.”  I guessed it was the wrong answer when the man ran across the street towards me.  His friends had momentarily stopped kicking the bag lady, at least.  But 911 still had me on hold. 

I didn’t know whether to bluff, act tough, or run.  So in the end I just told the truth.  “I’m calling 911.  I was going to tell them someone was getting beat up, but they’ll track the call to the same location either way.”

By that point, the guy was right in front of me.  His shirt said, “Don’t mess with Texas,” and he’d used gel in his hair and dangled a silver pitchfork earring from one ear.  When he came within a few feet, my self defense training kicked in, and I held out a palm in a flat “stop” position.  I said, “Back off,” which had always sounded ridiculous in practice, but he stopped.

Then he laughed.

In one quick lunge he grabbed my cell phone, before I realized what he was after.  One step back and he dropped the phone and crushed it under his black sneakered foot.  It seemed like it should take at least a heavy boot to crush a phone so completely, but when his foot rose, there was nothing left but a few cracked chips, the cover, and some shattered bits.

The man turned his back and walked away. 

Across the street, his friends walked away, too.

When they were out of sight around the corner, I gathered the remains of my phone into the pocket of my bag and crossed to check on the homeless woman they’d been kicking.  The woman’s head and shoulders showed atop the garbage bag on her lap.  Large shopping bags and one old suitcase clustered around, and she raised the umbrella a bit as I approached.

“It’s okay.  I’m the one who made them go away.”

“Go away.”

“Are you okay?”

“Go away, you trouble magnet.”

I wanted to be understanding.  I knew that many street people had mental issues, and I had no problem believing mental illness was real.  Half my relatives had some diagnosed mental condition, from obsessive compulsive to seasonal affective disorder.  In college my whole group of friends had spent evenings joking about what they might eventually be diagnosed with.  But even as I wondered if this woman might be paranoid schizophrenic, the strange certainty that had gripped me when I saw the umbrella made me reluctant to leave well enough alone.

“I saw you before, with your umbrella.”

“And then you made it rain.”

“I gave you my hot chocolate.”

“It was very milky.”

“Not very hot either, I suspect.”

Our eyes met for a moment, and the moment seemed perfectly sane.  Then the old woman’s eyes went wide and she said even louder.  “Go away.  Go to the mall!”

Then somehow the woman looped all the store bags onto her arms, took her shabby suitcase by the handle, and hugged the garbage bag to her chest.  She rose like a dumpster without the dumpster, and shuffled very slowly away, keeping her eyes on me as she left.

“What happened to your shopping cart?”

“Go, that way,” she motioned with her chin in the direction she wasn’t heading.  “Go to the big mall.”

“Okay, okay.  Nice seeing you again.”  I backed away, reluctant to turn my back while the old woman was still staring at me.

Once she rounded the same corner where the thugs had gone, I felt released to face the way I was moving.  I thought I’d seen the mall the woman meant, but I didn’t think this street could take me there.  Wouldn’t I have to cross the railroad tracks? 

Why was I even considering going to a mall, just because a crazy lady told me to?  But like so many choices lately, it seemed like a fine thing to do.

Following the road I was on, the Victorians of Oakland gave way to businesses and then to apartments.

 

I knew I’d passed into Emeryville again when I saw a utility box with the crosswalk guy.  It was the one  juggling his head and two spares, the one whose box we’d crashed into my first day in Emeryville.  Of course, I was in a different part of town, and for a moment I thought the painting had moved, then I realized there probably weren’t enough versions to make every utility box different.

Eventually, I passed a street where I should have turned to get home, but instead I walked forward, about as fast as I could comfortably pace myself.  The hair on my arms stood on end, and I thought it might rain soon. 

A skidding pebble somewhere behind on the road made me glance over my shoulder.  There was nothing to see, not even a bird.

The road I was following curved and then I found a pedestrian bridge over the train tracks that led right next to the glitzy outdoor mall.  Even if the homeless woman was crazy, her directions to the mall had been sane.

I tried to lose myself among the mass of weekend shoppers on the covered sidewalks.  The walkways weren’t super crowded, but they were never empty for more than a few feet at a time.  When I came to a section with stairs, I headed up and soon found myself in a giant modern bookstore. 

It wasn’t the sort of bookstore I’d usually frequent.  The aisles reminded me of a supermarket and signs hung overhead allowing people to spot the “cooking” or “local interest” sections from across the room.  There was even a Starbucks inside the bookstore.

Still, I felt better wandering in there than out on the streets.  I was heading towards the “science” section on aisle 24 when I saw Scott, and for a moment met his eyes.  He was standing in the “computers/technical” section on aisle 22 holding a large, floppy paperback.  The moment he looked up, I knew we both regretted it.  It would have been so much simpler if one of us had seen the other first.  We could have avoided interacting without any awkwardness.  As it was, I nodded and hurried on, momentarily to aisle 24, but then through the coffee shop and out of the store. 

The shops around me on the upper level all seemed to be restaurants.  I rushed past and down a stairway at the end.

I was going to keep walking straight back to the pedestrian bridge, but suddenly Scott was beside me.  How had he caught up?  How had he ended up next to me without any warning?

“In here,” he said and angled towards a shop door so suddenly that he would have run into me if I hadn’t done as he said.  Just inside the door he placed a hand on my elbow and pulled me behind a rack of dresses so we could both see over it and out the shop window.

“Do you know you’re being followed by… that man?”  He motioned with his chin as a guy with greasy hair and a bit of a belly walked past the window.  The man was mostly watching in front of himself, and didn’t glance our way.   He wasn’t the one in the “Don’t Mess with Texas” shirt who’d crushed my phone, but he could have been from the same group.

“What’s it to you?” I asked, pulling my arm free of Scott’s hand.

“Nothing.  Forget it.”  He turned to leave.

“Wait,” I almost reached out to grab his arm.  “I think he’s part of a group that was beating up a homeless woman, the one I gave my hot chocolate to.  She told me to go to this mall.  I thought maybe it was to hide or not lead them back to my place, but maybe it was some kind of a set up.”

He stared at me like I’d just coughed up a hair ball.  “You seriously have no idea what’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

He shook his head.  “Look, I don’t know why I came after you.  I shouldn’t have anything to do with you.  I just saw that guy following and—Never mind.  Buy yourself some new clothes, visit as many shops as you can, talk to lots of salespeople, maybe try a couple of perfume samples.  Then go home by a circuitous route, and you should be okay.”

“Right,” my estimation of his sanity took a nose dive.  He must have seen it on my face.  I said, “This might make more sense if I knew what you thought was going on or who I was hiding from.”

“Forget it.  I’m just some crazy, pushy jerk who you should forget about.  Do whatever you want.  Bye.”

And he left.  Almost as suddenly as he’d appeared beside me outside the shop, he was gone, and I was standing behind a rack of dresses. 

For some reason, I looked around the shop until I spotted a rack of sweaters I kind of liked.  I did what Scott had suggested.  I bought new clothes, visited other shops, and tried out perfume.  I chatted with salespeople more than I ever had in my life.  It made no sense as a way to hide.  I really wasn’t sure why I was doing it.  But when I bought an umbrella and it rang up for less than half the marked price, I felt like I was doing something right.

 

That night Judy had one of her favorite movies she wanted me to see.  As she was making popcorn (no oil, no butter, no salt, but some strange mix of spices that made up for all that), she asked how my day was.  I wanted to tell her about all my issues, how confused I was when I tried to help the homeless woman and then the strange way things had played out with Scott.  But I still didn’t know why I’d followed his instructions.  I really liked the sweater I’d bought, but it wasn’t like me to shop or chat, and I didn’t think I’d ever been followed before in my life.  The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to tell her.  Maybe it was my old habit of silence creeping back, or maybe I just felt stupid, but I also felt alive in a way I hadn’t for a long while.  It was something I wanted to share, but also something that felt private, like it might distort or fade if I tried to explain it.

We watched a movie about a boy pretending to be a dog.  It seemed to explain everything and nothing, and I think I dreamt in barks instead of words afterward.

 

Wednesday

It wasn’t until the door buzzer range a second time that I realized I was the only one left at work.  It was almost eight o’clock, but I’d been immersed in my latest sequencing puzzle.  There were SNiPs very near to the chocolate sequence that seemed unusually prone to copy number issues, and I was trying to deduce the greatest number of repeats in any of our database samples.  Feeling only half awake, I popped out of my cubby and hurried to the front glass doors.  A delivery guy was waiting with a tiny package and a hand held signature device.

I was going to tell him I didn’t have signing authority when he said, “Rush delivery for Celia Morales, sign here.”

Curiosity won out, and I signed.

Back at my desk, I opened the padded envelope to find a note with a key taped to the back.  In scrawled pencil it said, “I’m sorry.  There’s someone you should meet.  Come to 3467 63rd, room B3 at 8 PM. – Scott”

I wasn’t sure I could make it there by eight.  I wasn’t sure why I wanted to.  What sort of game was Scott playing with me?  Was he about to unveil a wife he shouldn’t have cheated on or a friend who could explain his bizarre instructions at the mall?  Even knowing it was stupid to go, I was itching to be on my way. 

I sent myself an email about the note and the address, so someone would know where to look if I didn’t come back.  Then I switched everything off and hurried away towards 63rd Street.

At least the roads were well lit.  In addition to street lamps, the moon was full, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.  The address on the note was a few block farther away than my apartment, and I hurried as fast as I could.

The building wasn’t much to look at when I arrived there puffing at 8:04.  It was a block of squat gray apartments that might have been zoned light industrial in a previous life.  I walked up the steps and though an unlocked front door, hoping to find a directory.  Instead I found mailboxes marked only with room numbers.  They were B1-B6, 11-16, and 21-26.  A quick look around showed 11-16 were on the floor where I’d entered, so I found the stairs leading down and quickly located B3. 

There hadn’t been much time to think why Scott sent a key, so I knocked first, but when there wasn’t an answer, I opened the door.

Then something broke inside my head.

Scott was spread eagled on a metal surface like a doctor’s exam table.  His hands and feet were chained to the corners by heavy black metal, something out of a torture chamber except that the cuffs had simple flip latches rather than key locks.  Of course, the latches wouldn’t be simple with all four limbs immobilized.  Scott was trapped, and someone else must have done those latches, but there was no sign of anyone else in the room.

I stood frozen in the doorway, staring.  My heart raced, and I felt my legs tense to run in the moment before other thoughts clouded my mind.

Scott was dressed in a shiny, tight one-piece outfit like something out of old science fiction movies.  It reached to his ankles and wrists, but left absolutely nothing to the imagination.  I could see his nipples through the swimsuit like cloth, and I could tell he didn’t have a hard on, at least at the moment, before I looked back at his face.  He’d turned his head to look at me, and I would have guessed his main emotion was surprise, but it was hard to be sure with tape covering his mouth.

I glanced around the rest of the room.  Not being totally naïve, I was checking for the sort of rubber or leather devices that I imagined people into S&M or B&D might use.  But other than the creepy table, the room contained only a folding chair and a suitcase.

If I wasn’t willing to turn around and leave, which I wasn’t, it seemed the next thing I had to do was remove the tape from Scott’s mouth.  But that would involve moving farther into the room.  If I’d bothered to replace the phone the thug smashed over the weekend, I could have called 911 and left them to sort out any embarrassing details.  But I hadn’t, and assuming Scott really couldn’t get out of those chains on his own, I probably wasn’t in much danger just removing tape from his mouth.

I stepped forward and pulled it off fast, hoping that was best.

“What are you doing here?” he sputtered.

“You sent a note and key.”  I held the key up, since it was still in my hand, and pulled the note out of my pocket.  “Shouldn’t you be the one to explain?”

“No, this isn’t right.  You shouldn’t be here.”

I stepped back.  There was real fear in his eyes now, confirming that what I’d seen before was possibly surprise.  Why would he be fearful now?  Had he really not sent the note?  Did he think I’d expose him?

“Why are you chained up?”

“Ha!  You really don’t want to talk to me tonight.  Go back to your safe, normal life, and don’t have anything to do with me.”  But even as he said it, he was different somehow, not fearful or surprised anymore.  He was starting to sound like the sort of jerk who’d take off without saying goodbye.  I was tempted to do as he said and just leave him there, but I had to admit to myself, I was also kind of turned on.  A quick glance where I didn’t want to look showed the feeling was mutual.

“What, you want some of this?”

I blushed.

“Tell me what’s going on, and I’ll leave.”

“Maybe I don’t want you to leave anymore.”

“Tell.”

“Ha.  I paid a lady to do it, and I’ll pay her again when she comes back in a few hours.  But if you want to have your way with me in between, I’m hardly in a position to stop you.   I’d advise you not to undo the chains though.  I can’t be held responsible for what I might do then.”

“No, not my thing.  If you’re happy with the arrangements you’ve made, I’ll go now.”

“Smart girl.”

“Not smart enough.”  I half turned to see one of the thugs from the weekend in the doorway.  Then there was another beside him, and they were both holding guns.

“What the Fuck?” Scott shouted, sounding as much like a jerk as when he’d propositioned me, and yet, it was reassuring now.

“Nothing to do with you, wolfboy.  We just want the girl.  Once we figured out you helped her last time, this seemed like the perfect set up.”  The second thug looked over his shoulder, towards the stairs.  The first waved his gun at me and said, “Let’s go.”

Despite all the parts I didn’t understand, I knew two guys with guns were a bigger problem than I wanted to tackle alone.  As I turned to leave, I manage to flip the release on one of Scott’s handcuffs, hoping the thugs wouldn’t notice.

They didn’t notice. 

I walked out the door and up the stairs with one in front of me and one behind.   We were just past the mailboxes and out the front door when I heard a thud behind me. 

As the man in front turned around, I jumped off the front steps and squatted down in a ball.  From the ground beside the steps, I heard rather than saw another thump and what might have been a kick to the head.

It happened so fast that I didn’t think to look back.  I knew it was Scott who grabbed my arm, yanking me up and into a run.  He half dragged me around the corner and down a block, then around another corner and into a dark doorway.

“No way to know if there are more.  Best to stay here.  I’ll hide you.”  And he pressed his body up against me, pushing me back into a cold metal wall.  He pressed every inch of himself very hard against me and then kissed me hard enough to slam my head into the wall.  I was incredibly aroused but furious.  It was as if my whole body betrayed me, melting, burning inside, remembering that one amazing night we’d had together.  But my mind screamed, screamed that my heart raced from fear and running, not from passion.  Or if I did lust for this jerk, it didn’t mean I wanted to act on it, wanted sex forced on me in this doorway.

His hands reached up under my shirt.  They were freezing, but still flamed against my breasts and hard nipples.  In one quick movement, he’d managed to push my bra up and out of the way.  He was nuzzling my ear, the stubble on his face scratching my skin.  I hated it, and yet I felt all the color return that had seemed to pour forth the night we had sex.  I wanted him so badly that if we’d both been naked, I think I would have given in.  Luckily, he was wearing that stupid one piece body suit.  I still had my pants on, and part of me was pissed as hell.

I brought my knee up hard and then slammed my heel down sideways onto his toes.   He stepped back for just a moment, and I was running.  Not sure if I was running from Scott or if the guys with the guns might be recovered and looking, I thrilled with the success of my self defense, the lust still burning through me, and the rain that started to fall as I ran.

 

I ran away from my apartment.  I don’t know if that was to keep my address secret from the guys with guns or just a side effect of the way I was facing.  But as I ran out of steam, I saw one of those house parties up ahead.  Remembering what Toni had said about avoiding parties in Emeryville, I looked back at the utility box on the corner.  This one had two crosswalk guys leaning towards each other to shake hands and overlap heads.  Or maybe they were sharing a single head.  Either way, I was still in Emeryville, but maybe my taste in house parties was different from Toni’s.  It seemed to me that if a mall offered a good way to hide, this party might be even better.

I slowed to a walk and ran my hands down my shirt to smooth it out.  Miraculously, I still had my purse and was able to pull out a comb and tidy my hair.  Then I walked up to the party house trying to look like I did this all the time.  The house itself was another Victorian, although it seemed to be the only one on the street, and I wondered if it was modern and just made to look older.  The walls were bright white and the trim around windows and doors shown a glossy black, making the partying people inside look like snapshots in black frames, hanging on a wall.

There was the stereotypical big guy standing by the front door, this one covered in tattoos across his chest and shoulders.  He wore only a black tank top despite the chill and rain, and he smiled in a tight lipped way as I came up the steps.

“I don’t think I know you, sweetheart.  Who’d you come here to meet?”

“Toni.”  It was the first name that came to mind and seemed as likely as any.

“Hmm.  Don’t think I know this Tony.”

As a moment of silence stretched, a shocked face framed in the nearest window met my eyes.  It was Al, the welder from The Forge.

I waved, “There’s Al, I know him, too.”

When the beefy guy glanced over his shoulder, Al disappeared from the frame.

Another long silence passed before Al and an older man, who must have been an older relative because they looked so much alike, appeared in the doorway.

Al stepped out, looking extremely nervous.  “Hey, Celia.  Didn’t expect to see you like this.  Let me show you around.”

The older man nodded at the muscle, and I followed Al in.  He was wearing a black tee shirt, which I guessed might count as party attire for him.  Of course, I was still in my office clothes and hardly one to talk.  Then I looked around and realized everyone was dressed in black and white.   The furniture, what there was of it, was black and white.  With my moss green sweater, I was the brightest thing in the room, and lots of eyes turned my way. 

A man in black leather looked me up and down, and the woman next to him in an all white mini-dress did about the same.  Other than dressing in all black and white, the party goers were a pretty eclectic mix.  There were Latinos, African Americans, whites, and uncertain mixes.  I didn’t see anyone Asian, which seemed a little unusual for Emeryville.  There were plenty of people my age, and some who looked younger than Al.  Some guys wore jackets and some wore tank tops.  Several of the guests were barefoot or in white or black socks, but many others wore shoes.  I vaguely remembered something about people wearing black and white to an art exhibit on opening night, although I thought that only happened a long time ago.  Still, Al was working on a sculpture the last time I saw him, so I thought I’d ask.

“How’s your DNA garbage can piece working out?”

He smiled, and I thought I’d said the right thing for once.  “It’s upstairs, want to see it?”

I couldn’t refuse, and he seemed eager to show me, so I followed him up a surprisingly empty staircase to the first room at the top.  The room was large with a high ceiling, and Al’s DNA sculpture was suspended, a pillar of intricately wrapped garbage cans dangling so that they hovered a couple feet off the floor. 

There were a few older men, including the one who’d come to the door with Al, hanging around the edges of the room.  No other art was displayed and a white dresser had been pushed against one wall, making me think this was someone’s bedroom with the bed removed to make way for this one piece of art.  The people in the room barely glanced at my colorful attire.  They chatted in low voices and pointedly ignored me and Al.

Al seemed to be waiting for me to comment, so I walked forward and around his work.  The double helix was made from some sort of metal tubing.  The rungs in between looked like bicycle spokes with random nuts and larger pieces representing the various DNA bases before they stuck into the garbage cans.  I was still a little confused as to what the cans represented, perhaps some strange exaggeration of hydrogen bonding.  There were four garbage cans stacked on top of each other with a hook and pulley at the top.  Then a rope ran across the ceiling, through an eyebolt, and down the wall to tie off at the base of the dresser.  That was probably why they’d left the dresser, although it also held a bowl of nuts, a tray of drinks, a phone, and some tissues.

“Amazing work.  How did you get it in here?”

He motioned to the windows on the far side of the room.  They were the type with two panes that could open out like shutters.  I wondered if they’d been installed with the idea of moving things in and out.  “With the pulley, it’s not that heavy.  Just two guys here and one on a ladder outside to guide it up.”

“Very cool,” I said, wondering if I could get over to the nuts.  I hadn’t eaten since lunch.

“You should go inside to see the sequences written there.”

“Oh,” I said, wondering if all the guests had to slide under the bottom garbage can, which was only two or three feet off the ground, to see inside.  “What sequence did you end up using?”   

“You’ll see.”

I hoped there was a written explanation or something inside, because I wasn’t going to recognize any sequence written out in A, C, G, and T format.  All the same, I was curious, and to be a good sport I went and crouched down by the sculpture.  Using my hands for balance, I could get my head just low enough to look up into the long tube.  All four garbage cans were open to each other, and where each bicycle spoke would have poked through a yellow, green, blue, or red LED glowed.  There were also sequences writing in parallel spirals, like ripples spreading out from the LEDs, only the ripples were more detailed, with letters crowded together in tight, precise printing.

I heard Al say from behind me, “You have to stand up inside to really appreciate it.”

Afraid to touch anything, I scooted around until my butt hit the floor, then I tried to rise from a sit to a stand without touching anything, but brushing the side just the tiniest bit made the whole tube move,  
and the only way to keep it from bouncing against me more was to lightly brace my hands to the sides. 

I stood there silently, wondering if Al would ask what I thought or complain about me bumping his artwork.  It felt awkward to call out from inside, because I’d be interrupting any other conversation in the room.  There was also a strange feeling of isolation that would be odd to talk across, even worse than speaking between bathroom stalls.  As the thought of bathroom stalls reminded me that I was standing inside garbage cans, the whole tube shifted a bit and then suddenly fell around me with a crash.

The gap I’d climbed in through was gone.  I was trapped in a metal tube barely wider than my shoulders but much taller than my arms could reach.  The four colors of LEDS still shone around me, and for a moment I was dazzled by their sudden movement.   Then anxiety overcame awkwardness and I called out, “Al, what happened?”

There was no answer.  I could hear people shuffling around the room outside the tube, but no one spoke.  Then the room lights switched off so no white light came from overhead.  I was lit all around by the yellow, green, blue, red of the double helix.

It might have been inspiring, except I couldn’t get out.  I was just uncertain enough of what was going on that I kept silent, waiting.

Then someone started speaking, “The resonance of DNA contains the magic of the masses.  The resonance of DNA contains the magic of the few.  To harness the resonance is to harness the magic…”

It sounded like some weird science cult.  Maybe they were harmless, but I’d had enough.

“Let me out!” I shouted.

“We give of our heads, our hands, our hearts, to understand…”

“Let me out!  Let me out!”

“We sacrifice our time, our passion, and our blood…”

“You there, in the white shirt, let me out right now!”  I couldn’t see anyone, but I’d been told singling out one person was more likely to get a response.  It seemed worth hoping that one of the people wearing a white shirt might think I meant him.  I didn’t see any point in calling out to Al.

The chanting went on as I tried to brace myself against the garbage can walls and shimmy up to the opening by the hook and pulley.  There was room between the ropes for me to climb out if I could get there.  It wasn’t much of a plan, but no one in the room had shown a gun or hinted that they were violent lunatics.  I was just thinking they were better than the people I’d run from earlier when I heard the door open and a not so whispered conversation.

“She got away with wolfboy’s help.  We couldn’t find them so we looped back here.”

I stopped a little over halfway up the tube knowing the person I heard whispering had a gun when he’d stood in the doorway of Scott’s room.  I froze cold to my center wondering if I’d run into the very trap I’d meant to escape.  Peeking out the top of a tube would create a whole different problem if there were guns involved.

Then there were a series of fast loud noises.  It sounded like the person whispering let out a gasp, then someone else roared, I swear.  And a minute after that I think they both crashed into the garbage can tube.  It might not have been so dramatic, if I hadn’t been over halfway up, having shifted the center of gravity higher.  As I crashed I was thrown towards what had been the top.  My head popped out and hit the wall hard.  

Maybe I blacked out for a moment because the next thing I knew there were four guys on the floor and Scott was fighting with two more as others clung to the wall or inched toward the door.

No one was looking at me, possibly because they’d thought I was unconscious.  Maybe I had been.  But I’d landed right by the dresser with the phone.  It hadn’t worked well last time, but I was pretty sure that dialing 911 on a land line could be traced even if the phone was smashed pretty fast.  Anyway, it wasn’t my phone this time, and I had to do something.  I pulled the phone down to me and typed in the numbers almost without looking.  I didn’t even try to hold the receiver to my ear, just let the works slide down beside me where they might go unnoticed in the confusion.

It seemed like forever, but Scott was still fighting one guy, maybe the one I’d met first with Al, when we all heard the siren.  Both Scott and the other guy looked around and saw everyone else had left or was lying on the floor.  I’m not sure either registered that my eyes were open.  They let go of each other with a shove or two.  The guy from the party ran back downstairs into a crowd that was starting to scream, and I watched without a word as Scott opened those double windows and jumped.

 

There weren’t many precedents in my life for what to do next.  I’d once been at the center of a chandelier when it fell to the floor in a fancy hotel.  I’d been maybe twenty-two at the time, in a little black dress with my hair done up.  Suddenly there was broken glass in little crystals scattered all around me on the floor, and I stood untouched, frozen with uncertainty.

Now there were bodies scattered around me.  Some of them starting to moan and move.  Red and blue lights pulsed through the open windows and reflected on the genetic sculpture that looked even larger sprawled across the width of the room.  I sat with my knees tucked up to my chest, back against a wall, half hidden by a dresser.  The phone still lay beside me.   I picked up the receiver and said, “Hello?”

“Yes?  Can you state the nature of your emergency?”

“I think some cult tried to kidnap me.  There’s police or someone outside now, but I’m upstairs, in the room with the open double windows.  There’s been a fight, and someone had a gun.”

“Is anyone hurt?”

“Yes, and I’m worried they might hurt me if they get up.”

“Stay on the phone.”

I think I heard the information passed to a walkie talkie below.  Or maybe I imagined it.  But a few seconds later there was a cop at the bedroom door with a gun.

“Nobody move!”

I sat, phone clearly visible, the only female in the room.  I felt so much like the damsel being rescued, but I figured that’s what police get paid for. 

What happened next was kind of a blur to me.  Soon there was an officer with each of the men on the floor.  It turned out there were only three left in the room. 

One cop looked at the crashed sculpture and said something about special investigations.  The guy next to him, clearly older and in charge, shook his head just a notch, then paced over to me.

“You the one who called?”  He nodded at the phone in my hand. 

I nodded back.  The man loomed over me, gun in hand but at his side.  His close cropped salt-and-pepper hair made him look trustworthy, like a TV dad or old west sheriff.

“Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Have an EMT check her anyway,” he said to the younger cop.

As if summoned by his words, two EMTs with red crosses on their jackets and their first aid kits came rushing in.  They went to the obviously injured men first, and even in my vague, foggy state of mind, that seemed as it should be.

“What happened?”

“They dropped the DNA sculpture from the ceiling with me inside.  They were having some sort of ceremony, like a cult of genetics or something.”

“Are you sure it’s a cult?”

“No.  But they said stuff like ‘the DNA contains the magic.’ And they wouldn’t let me out even though I was shouting.  And I think they tried to kidnap me earlier.”

“Call Juan,” He said to the younger cop, who nodded like it was obvious.

An EMT came to check my pulse and shine a light in my eyes, and I wondered if he was the same one who came when the safe fell on my car.

It seemed like only moments later when Detective Juan Santiago, Special Investigations, introduced himself and chased the EMT away.

The three cult members who’d been on the floor were each being strapped to a stretcher.  I couldn’t believe I was sitting unharmed in the middle of this. 

Juan asked, “Do you know what’s going on here?”

I couldn’t help it.  I started to laugh.  It all seemed too impossible and yet so much the way life had worked before I’d hidden away with Lance.  Somehow, these things just happened to me, only now they involved guns and sculptures rather than lightening and chandeliers.

By the time I could stop laughing, an EMT had come back and wrapped me in a blanket, checked me head to toe, and moved me to a chair in an adjacent room.

Juan did not look pleased.

“Are you ready now?”

I shrugged, drained by the laughter and feeling like I’d lost track of something, maybe time.

“Tell me your name.”

“Celia Morales.”

“Did you know any of the people here tonight?”

“One guy, Al, who made the sculpture.  I met him at The Forge.  I think one of the older guys might have been related to Al, but that’s just an impression.”

“What were your previous interactions with Al?”

“He was working on that sculpture with the DNA wrapped garbage cans.  He wanted a DNA sequence to put on it, and I brought him something from my work, but he didn’t want it.”

“Where do you work?”

“BioSign.”

“You’re a scientist?

“Yes.”

“Do you know where Al works?”

“I don’t even know his last name.  But they make everyone at The Forge fill out paperwork, so someone there probably knows.”

Juan typed something into his phone.

“Tell me in your own words what happened in the room next door.”

It took effort not to flee into laughter again.  I was ecstatically happy to be alive, but my brain kept dodging sideways around what I seemed to know.  I tried to answer him, but when I got to the part about Scott bursting in, we had to backtrack to the note delivered to my work and the place where I’d found Scott.  I tried to make it sound a little less strange than it was.  While Scott was sometimes a jerk, I thought he’d risked a lot for me tonight.  I honestly blanked on his last name and had no idea where he lived.  Maybe the police wouldn’t be able to find him, and that seemed fair to me.

“You’re saying this Scott person beat up the three guys in there and was fighting a forth when the police arrived?”

“I think so.  I’m not sure I was conscious the whole time, but I didn’t see anyone else on Scott’s side.  But it wasn’t his fault.  They came after us, and I think he followed them back here, maybe to help me.”

“But you don’t remember his last name?”

“We only had one date, and we didn’t particularly get along afterward.”

“But he incapacitated three men to help you?”

“Well, they might have done stuff to him that I don’t know about.  At the very least, they set us both up.”

Juan glanced aside, as if he found dealing with me distasteful.  It reminded me of how Lance used to glance away, back when we still spoke and I said something he judged inadequate.  Even then, he left me nothing solid to challenge.  As we interacted less and less, I never knew what he was thinking, and it wore me away inside.  As soon as I left him, the world crept back in and started to fill me, but with someone slightly different than who I’d been before.  Until tonight, I’d barely noticed.

“Tell me, how did you end up at this house?”

“I was trying to get away and hide from the men who’d grabbed me before.  It was just bad luck.”

“Do you believe in luck?”

That was not a question I’d been expecting or had asked myself.  I gave the first answer that came to mind.  “Not really, it’s just a figure of speech people use, isn’t it?”

“Do you believe in magic, witchcraft, Wicca, auras, ley lines, or anything of that nature?”

“Um, not really.”

“Do any sorts of unusual occurrences seem to happen around you more that around other people?”

“A chandelier fell on me once, and a safe fell on my car.”

He punched something into his phone again, and mumbled, “Things fall on you.”

 

When the police drove me home, I saw the utility box with the crosswalk guy that I passed each day on my way to work.  The one juggling heads, had been removed.  He’d been replaced by one shining a flashlight down where his head had been.  His head hung like a bowling ball from his left hand.

The smell of mint tea greeted me as I walked into my apartment.  And I stood dazed, just inside the door.

“Is that you Celia?”  Judy called from the dining area.

“Yeah.”

“I knew it must be.  Would you like some tea?”

The question turned itself over and over in my mind.  Would I like tea?  Mint tea?  Mint tea now?  It seemed bizarre after the night I’d had to be offered tea like everything was normal, but how would Judy know?

“Sure, thanks.”  I moved my feet forward to the kitchen, and as Judy came in too, I asked, “How are you?”

“Fine, fine.  Just catching up on my junk mail, and you?”

She puttered with tea as I pulled some cheese out of the refrigerator and cut myself a few slices.  Then I sliced an apple and finally said, “I think some crazy cult tried to kidnap me and use me in a ritual.”

Judy patted me on the shoulder and said, “Why don’t you sit down and tell me all about it?”

She carried two cups of tea to the table, and I brought the apples and cheese still on the cutting board.

“Does this crazy cult have a name?”  She sounded like my mom asking about a middle school crush.

“If so, they didn’t tell me.”

“No matter, names people tell you are never real names anyway.  So what happened?”

So I started with the note at work, told about Scott strapped to a table, and finished with how I’d ended up inside the DNA sculpture that they’d probably planned to trap me in the whole time.

“And you weren’t suspicious when Al was so friendly to you?”

“I thought he was just in a better mood, or being polite at a party.  Seriously, that’s what surprises you most?”

“Not at all.  I have plenty of other questions, but you’ve finished your snack.  Maybe you should relax and get some sleep.  We can talk more in the morning if you want.  I’m planning to make bran muffins.”

I nodded, wondering if people used to make more sense when who I was inside was slightly different, or if I’d just been away too long to remember.  Clearing my dishes, I decided a long hot bath would be best.  

As the bath was running, I brushed my teeth, then I climbed in when it was only half full.  The sound of water crashing down somehow reminded me of Scott jumping out the window.  Had there been a crashing sound?  He’d opened the windows, but I’d never looked out at what was below.  Could there have been a crash I’d forgotten about?  Somehow I’d been assuming that after beating up three guys and jumping out a window, Scott was still okay.  I was suddenly worried for him, but couldn’t think of any way to check in.

He wasn’t likely to go back to the address where he’d been strapped to the table.  Even if he had a prostitute coming back later, he couldn’t be desperate enough to return there.

The sound of the crashing water changed, and I saw it was bursting out from around the faucet.  I turned the handle off, but that increased the spray coming out where it shouldn’t. 

Hopping out of the tub I pulled on my robe and towel and opened the door to holler, “Judy, how do we turn off the water to the building?”

She was down the hall with the surprising speed I’d seen her muster once or twice before.  Taking in the spurting water at a glance, she went and turned a knob beneath the bathroom sink.  It worked.

“How does that stop the water at the tub?”

“How should I know?  You can ask the plumber.  Guess we should call tonight, unless we want to hand dump water into the toilet every time we need to flush.  That knob turns it all off.”

She headed for the phone, and I followed behind like a child.  You can finish your bath if you want.  They won’t send anyone that fast.

I went back and rinsed my face and hair, wanting to at least wash off any debris from my adventures, but the bath wasn’t soothing after all, so I didn’t linger.

I’d put on fresh clothes and dried my hair by the time someone knocked calling out, “Plumber!”  Judy had disappeared to her room, possibly going to sleep.  So I answered the door.  In front of me, decked out as a plumber with a tool belt, tool box, and everything, was the woman who’d dropped a safe on my car the day I arrived in Emeryville.  “You’re a plumber?” I asked.

“I am.  Chantelle Howard, the apartment management company called me about your bathtub faucet.”  We stood facing each other in the doorway.  “If this is too awkward, I could call in, and you could wait for the morning shift.”

“No, no.  There’s not any rule saying we can’t have contact before the trial, is there?”

“Not that they told me.”

She came in with all her stuff and headed straight for the bathroom.  I guessed she’d been here or to an identical apartment before.

Someone had mopped up the floor, and I realized I should have done that.  I’d have to remember to thank Judy.

“Where did the water come out?”

“Behind the faucet?”

“Behind this molding?” she pointed.

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

She worked in silence for several minutes, and I was ready to wander off and do something else when she said, “You know, we could opt for arbitration.”

“What?”

“I mean, it’s faster.  Do you just want your car fixed?”

“They tell me it isn’t worth fixing.”

“Another car then, or money.  We could work it out.”

“Maybe.  I should ask some friends.”

“Sure, I’ll leave my card with a cell number.  Or you can tell the cops you’ll opt for arbitration.”  Then she gave a snort and said, “What did you do to this pipe?  Was the faucet blocked?  Did you try to flush it out yourself?”

“No, I was just filling the bath.  It was about half full and water started spurting from behind the faucet.”

She looked at me with raised eyebrows but had the courtesy to just say, “Huh.”  Then she opened her tool box while saying, “You’re going to need a new faucet.  For now, I can cap it here, and you’ll be able to use the shower and everything else.  Then you can work out with the landlord who’s paying for the faucet and having it installed.”

“Does the landlord pay for this part?”

“Yeah, I’m going to put it down as a defective faucet.  I can’t see any better cause if it happened like you said.”

I couldn’t tell whether she believed me or was just making nice in hopes I’d choose arbitration instead of court.  Either way, I took her card at the end and wished her a good night.

 

Thursday

At work the next morning I saw Marlene enter her office.  It was the first time I’d seen her wear trousers, although the clicking high heels hadn’t changed.   Since she only seemed to come in for an hour or two a day, and not every day, I decided to seize the opportunity. 

First I asked her about some work I’d been doing, and she showed great concern and interest. Then I said, “You know, we had a faucet break in the apartment last night.  The plumber capped off the pipe leading to the bathtub, but she didn’t know whether Judy and I needed to pay for a new faucet to be installed or if the apartment maintenance company would cover that.”

Marlene looked at me with her mouth slightly open as if she’d forgotten she owned the building I lived in.  “I have no idea.  Whatever the maintenance company says.” 

That was fair enough.  I didn’t expect any special treatment, so I moved on to the interesting part.  “The plumber they sent was the woman who accidently pushed the safe onto my car.”

Marlene didn’t seem to be listening until I said, “She suggested we settle for the car through arbitration.”

Then Marlene looked up, “Oh, that might be a good idea.  If you need to approve an arbiter, let me know the name.”

“Thanks, Marlene.”  Somehow I’d expected Marlene to care about the building she owned or that the plumber sent out was the person who wrecked my car.  Instead, she was interested in the arbiter.  I went back to my desk figuring I’d never understand people, but called the cops to opt for arbitration anyway. 

Then Don stopped by my cube and set a tape dispenser on the corner of my desk.  The tape in it was red, which made me laugh, but Don didn’t say anything.

 

That night I worked late again and was a little nervous about walking home when I left.  I chose to take an indirect route and then decided to stop by Natalie’s Chocolates for their last hour special.  Not quite admitting to myself that I wanted to check up on Scott, I stayed until closing.

 

Friday

After another long workday and another visit to Natalie’s, I came home to find Judy sorting stacks of paper into clear plastic report covers.

“What’s all this?” I asked.

“Packets for a convention tomorrow.  I have to drop them off tonight, but the copy center was out of these covers.  I went and bought them at the office store but the print shop was closing, so now it’s my problem.”

“Can I help?”

Judy rushed over and hugged me, “Oh, you’re so sweet.  You don’t have to, you know?  Here, I’ll set the packets out on top of each cover and you can fasten them in.”  As we started in like a mini-assembly line, she said, “It’s so nice of you to do this.”

“Really, Judy.  You’re the one who’s always doing stuff for me.  You picked me up after my car wreck.  You feed me all the time.  You even called the plumber and mopped up when I broke the faucet.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” Judy said, “They assigned someone for your arbitration.  I wrote the name by the phone.  They want you to call and schedule, but it’s probably too late for today.”

“That’s okay.  Marlene wanted me to check the name with her first?”

“Really?  She told me to check with her about plumbers in the future.”

I thought that was odd, since Marlene had shown no interest when I asked about the faucet, but maybe she’d just been distracted at the time.

“I got the new faucet put in,” Judy continued.  “I hope you like it.”

“So long as the water goes where it’s supposed to, I like it.  Thanks for following up on that.”

“No problem, I like to be useful.  By the way, there’s a book group meeting tomorrow.”

“Am I supposed to have a book?”

“Oh, you can just talk about whatever you’ve been reading, or doing.  It’s sort of like tea leaves, everyone just finds their own patterns.”

 

Saturday

I had a lump in my stomach as I pushed through the heavy metal doors into The Forge.  I didn’t want to let down Ruth, but I had no idea what she might have heard about Al or if he might have other friends here who would hassle me.  The building was mostly quiet, since the kids’ class was earlier than most others came in.  As I reached the group, one girl ran up to me holding a beaded necklace pulled out from her neck.

“Look what I made at day care.  We just put the beads on the string there, but I told them I could make my own with metal or clay.  Can we?  Please?”

I looked around for Ruth.  She was just coming out of a supply closet with a big block of clay on a board.

“Looks like clay to me.  We’ll see what we can do.”

The girl with the beads hugged me.  Ruth smiled.

It wasn’t until after class that I got to ask Ruth if she’d heard anything about Al’s sculpture.  She was rushing off to some appointment and just asked, “Is there something I should know?”  I told her it would wait until next week.

 

When Judy took me to Neverland this time, we didn’t go up to the front door.  Instead, we followed a path of gray flagstones around back to a garden that took organic to the next level.  There was a compost pile with a pitchfork sticking out and a big wooden box labeled “worm hotel”.  There was a solar shower up on a rise where other gardens might feature a gazebo, and from the drip lines radiating out, it was clear the shower run off went straight to the garden. 

I resisted asking what they used for soap as Emma wandered by holding a rabbit and said, “You haven’t met Pipkin, have you?”

Suddenly Pipkin was in my arms, and I tried to tuck her feet so she wouldn’t scratch me.  The rest of her was very soft, and I realized I’d never held a rabbit before. 

“Just keep her out of the way while we choose vegetables from the garden,” Judy said.  So for the next ten or twenty minutes I held a warm, soft, slightly squirmy rabbit while the members of the book group trickled in one by one.  There were at least twice as many women as I’d met the first night.  Many of them spoke to me and patted Pipkin before they wandered into the vegetable planters and came out carrying something to add to a salad.

When the group was ready to move inside, Judy told me, you can just put Pipkin down on the grass.  I had thought I was protecting the vegetables from the rabbit, but I concluded I must have been protecting the rabbit from careless feet, or something.  Whatever the case, I set Pipkin down, and we all went inside and washed hand before gathering around an enormous wooden table. 

There were ten of us gathered for book group this time, and the table could easily have held twenty.  Towering stained glass windows at one end of the dining room gave the impression of being in a church, but there were no pictures in the glass, only a mosaic of colors.

The salad everyone but me had helped pick was passed around first.  Then there was a course of bean soup and pita followed by couscous and roasted vegetable.  Finally we shared a tray with cheese and grapes.  People served themselves wine or tea from a side table, and Emma said, “Would anyone like to start the discussion?”

“I will,” said LiMei, and tossed her hair with that flash of red just as she had removing her welding gear at the Forge.  “I’ve been reading about birds and how some of them may sense the earth’s magnetic field to help find their way.  People are making better maps of the magnetic field now.  Evidently at a detail level, it can vary with how thick the earth’s crust is or what metals are deposited in a certain spot.  There’s concern that human mining and so on might interfere with the birds’ guidance system.”

Then without a break the woman to her left said, “I found a book of sky photographs that explains the colors and stuff.  It ranges from the aurora borealis to the after image of lightening.”

“I read the new translation of the Odyssey, and I think everyone should read it, even if they’ve read others before.”

“Has anyone noticed a cat leaving squirrel tales around here?  I thought it was just something cats did, but when I tried to research it, I couldn’t find anything.”  That was from Toni.

“I read a novel where the main character could turn into a Jungle cat.”

“I’m in the middle of a memoir about Steve Jobs.”

I’d gone to a bookstore coffee shop for lunch and picked up an anthology just in case I needed some book to talk about.  So when my turn came, I said, “I read a collection of short stories involving magic and science fiction.”

Judy was next to me.  “I’m reading a history of Bay Area Art.”

“I read a popular science book about junk DNA and how some of it might trigger schizophrenia and autism.”

Emma was last and said, “I’ve been reading about global climate change and noticing that it seems to rain in the evenings here more than it used to.  Has anyone else noticed?  Did your sky book say anything about rain?”

“Not so much, it was more about colors and condensation still in the sky.  I assume it falls as rain later. LiMei, did your stuff on magnetic fields say anything about rain or visible effects in the sky?”

LiMei shook her head.  “I noticed two other people mentioned cats, one with squirrels, and that could sort of connect to my birds.”

“I see lots of bird feather on the ground,” said Toni.  “What about Bay Area art?  Any showing of animals or weather?”

“Oh my,” Judy said.  “It wasn’t even all about visual art, some of it was beat poetry and so on, probably connects to everything if we look deep enough.  It had DNA art, too.”

The woman who’d shared about the junk DNA book looked a bit lost for a moment, then offered, “A lot of my book was speculative.  It could have led to the sort of short stories you read.”

She looked at me.  I couldn’t remember her name from the round of greetings in the garden, but I suspected I was supposed to come up with a connection, probably to someone who hadn’t been mentioned yet.  “What about Steve Jobs?  Wasn’t some of what he did close to science fiction until he did it?”

“I guess he relates to that as much as to Odysseus.  What about Bay Area art?  Do they mention the Apple design mystique in there?”

The conversation drifted from there.  A lot of people asked Judy about her art book that I’d never even seen her read.  Most of the discussion just drifted around me, until suddenly I noticed it was eight o’clock.  I felt certain that Scott would go to Natalie’s tonight.  If I wanted to find out what had happened to him, I needed to get there before he left.  But I couldn’t really ask Judy to leave now and drive me.  It would probably be rude for me to leave when everyone else was still raptly talking, but I had to.

I fretted for a few more minutes until Emma said, “Why don’t we all move on to the den now?”

As everyone got up, I asked Judy, “Could I borrow your car for an hour?”

I thoroughly deserved the furrowed brow look she gave me.  Then without a single question, she handed me her keys.

“Thanks.  You really are a super nice person.”

In ten minutes I was parked down the street from Natalie’s Chocolates.  The traffic, the parking, everything seemed to be going my way.  I walked in and there was Scott, just making his selections for the three item special.

“Hey, Scott, good to see you.”  I tried to sound light.  He looked like a caged animal.

“Oh, hi.  I was just getting something to go.”

“No, that’s a pity.  Just stay a few minutes? While you drink your chocolate?  Or I could get mine to go and walk with you?”

He sighed and put on a fake smile, so unlike the image I remembered from our first night.  But he said, “I guess I can stay a few minutes.”  He told the barista, “I’ll take my hot chocolate for here and the candies to go, please.”

I ordered and paid as quickly as I could, keeping a discrete eye on him the whole time.  He sat at the counter where we’d been the first night, and I couldn’t help it, something in me melted and wished we could go back in time.

When I sat beside him with my chocolate, I was reluctant to speak, but he’d already finished half of his cup.  “So, are you okay?”

“Fine, thanks.”  He had that plastic smile again.  It infuriated me even as I fell for him again.

“Did I do something to offend you?”

“No,” his face softened for just a moment then went back to being a mask.  “I tried to tell you, I’m not someone you want to be involved with.”

He drank the last of his chocolate in one gulp.  “Now, I really should be leaving.”

“Please, just tell me one more thing?”

He sighed, but spread his hands, “Okay.”

A million sappy alternatives ran through my head.  I was sure I’d never see him again, that he’d avoid Natalie’s to avoid me, no matter what I said.  Then one tiny piece that I’d barely let myself think about forced its way out.  “Why did they call you ‘wolfboy’?”

He really didn’t have a poker face.  The mask he was trying to maintain slipped and then seemed to dangle from one ear.  He tried to smile, to laugh it off.  But he knew it wasn’t convincing.  Still, he tried to blow me off.  “You really don’t want to know.”

“I think I might need to know.” 

He stared at me then.  Those amazing green eyes held mine, and I wished we were alone someplace, no matter how bad an idea that might be.

He looked around the chocolate shop.  We were the only customers, and the woman who’d served our chocolate was tidying a display shelf on the far wall.

“Do you know anything?”

I shook my head.

“I’m not supposed to speak of this.”  He was silent for too long.

“Were they after you or me?” I asked.

To give him credit, he didn’t pretend not to know.  “You.”

“And who are they?”

“I really can’t answer that.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

He shook his head, unimpressed.  So I played the only card that had worked before, “Wolfboy?”

He looked down, “It’s not a nice name.  Please don’t say it again.”

“Please, tell me something?”

“You are in danger.  And among other reasons, you shouldn’t be around me because I might make it worse.”

“It looked to me like you saved me that night.”

“I was out of my mind.”

“Because of the full moon?”

He looked afraid, or distrustful, like he’d run away.  His neck and arm muscles tensed.  I took his hand.  A twitch almost pulled it away, but then he held on tight.  “What do you know?”

“There was a party on a Wednesday involving some weird cult.  The moon was full.  You were strapped to a table and were acting strange.   Then when I was trapped, you showed up, beat up a bunch of guys, jumped out a window, and now you say you’re fine.”

“And?”

“And they called you wolfboy, like someone who could turn into a wolf under a full moon.”

“So you believe a turned into a wolf?”

“Not really.”

“Then what do you believe?”

“That you could tell me.”

“I’m telling you, I can’t be involved with you.”  He still held my hand.  He kept almost meeting my eyes.  I was pretty sure he wanted the opposite of what he said.

“What if we just run into each other sometimes?”

He laughed and smiled for real.  “That seems to be hard to avoid.”

“Then it wouldn’t hurt to exchange phone numbers, would it?”

“How are those even related?”

“Well, if we’re going to run into each other anyway, we should be able to arrange it if we really need to.”

He laughed again, shook his head, and gave me his number.  Then he stood, still holding my hand.  I hoped he’d kiss me before he left.  Instead, he let go of my hand, and I let him.

 

Monday

When I heard Marlene arrive at work, I followed her into her office. 

“I got the name and number for the arbiter.”  I handed her the slip.

“No,” she shook her head and wrote another name.  “See if you can get this one.”

Then she turned to a small pyramid of green boxes on her desk.  “And here, one of these is for you.  Remember the ACT Genes account you worked on?  They’re offering our employees free DNA screening.  All the instructions and sampling stuff are in the box.”

“Cool, I guess.  But how are you going to get the boxes to the other employees?  I never see anyone but you and Don.”

“Well, for some of them this is a second job or they work mostly from home.  But they all come in to meet with me once in a while.  I’ll try to introduce you in the future.”  She was looking at her fingernails rather than at me.  They might have been freshly polished.  I didn’t remember the very dark shade of red that gleamed like ripe tomatoes, but it wasn’t the sort of thing I usually noticed.  Still, I could tell I was dismissed.

“Sure, that would be great.” 

I left wondering when the others met with her, since I’d been at work almost twelve hours a day for the last week.  I also wondered if any but the three of us here were full time employees, not that anyone would have known this was Marlene’s full time job if they’d gone by how often she was in the office.  The work world had either changed a lot while I’d been living in the country, or this company had some very strange personnel policies.   

As I walked by Don’s cube, he seemed to be stringing rubber bands together in a chain and didn’t look up as I passed.

 

I took a long lunch so I could go home, call about the arbiter, and add the ACT Genes kit to a birthday gift for my niece.  Judy’s latest project spread across the dining room table.  She was typing up some collection of essays.  They appeared to be for a high school magazine.

I made myself a sandwich and went to sit on the sofa in the living room.  I called the number for arbitration scheduling and asked about changing arbiters.

“Is there a conflict of interests?” the woman on the other end asked in a bored but not unfriendly way.

“Umm, I guess my boss knows him and feels there might be.”

“Where do you work?”

“BioSign.”

“Well, we have Geraldine Green available this Wednesday at 3 PM.  Would that be acceptable if the other parties accept?”

I agreed, hung up, and figured I wasn’t even going to ask Marlene about this one.  I hadn’t thought it through, but negotiating for arbiters seemed like something of a cheat.

I finished my sandwich and shifted to a happier task.  My niece, Marie, was turning eighteen next week.  While my real present for her was a trip to California, I didn’t feel eighteen was too old to want a wrapped gift.  I’d planned to send her a Thai shawl I’d bought when I was eighteen.  I’d been traveling with friends in Southeast Asia, and though I’d never worn a shawl before in my life, I’d fallen in love with the angular pattern on the deep red weave.  Over the years, while I’d still had little need of a shawl, I used it as a sofa cover and a table cloth for a small end table.  It had been part of all my dorm room décor and the first apartment I’d rented out of school.  Somehow when Lance and I moved to the country, it hadn’t fit in with our country house, so in all the times Marie had visited there, she wouldn’t have seen it.  Now I wrote a note explaining what it meant to me.  I wanted to tell Marie what she meant to me, how she’d brought that little bit of life when she visited that eventually made me realize I was dying inside.  But those weren’t things to put in a birthday note. 

I wrapped up the DNA sampling kit too, and told her the opportunity was hers if she was curious.  I knew she would be.   I would have been curious myself, but I felt like it was a fine coming of age activity, and I could always buy my own kit later.  I packed both gifts together in a box and ran by the post office on my way back to work.

 

Wednesday

I left work early to make it to city hall by 3 PM.  Our arbitration meeting was in a small room down an antiseptic corridor.  I arrived to find the plumber, Chantelle, and her boyfriend seated quietly to one side of a table.  An older black woman sat at the head of the table and a younger woman with warm mocha skin and a jet black laptop sat at the foot.  Some part of my brain said I should have felt outnumbered, since everyone else in the room was African American.  But I’d decided I liked Chantelle, and the older woman had a face like everyone’s grandma.  My only real apprehensions were about Chantelle’s boyfriend, a big guy whose name I still hadn’t learned, but I realized he might feel equally outnumbered being the only male in the room.

The analysis all flashed through my mind before the older woman stood and offered her hand saying, “I’m Geraldine Green, your assigned arbiter.  Is everyone ready to begin?”

It was like sitting down to chat with Yoda or Oprah.  We all explained our parts of the situation.  Chantelle’s boyfriend, who turned out to be named Will, volunteered that the photo safe that fell on my car wasn’t even damaged, so he just wanted to make things right about my car.  I’d brought the car papers.  The arbiter had a blue book listing.  I admitted the car had probably only been in fair to good condition.  The arbiter suggested that in cases like this where I’d been inconvenienced and would have to shop for a new car, it might be appropriate to bump the price up to the very good or excellent category. 

Will looked at the numbers and said, “I don’t think you could buy a reliable car for even the ‘excellent’ price.  You want me to hook you up with a decent car?”

“Would that be okay?” Chantelle asked the arbiter.

“We can work with anything you all agree to, but we’d have to define what’s expected of a ‘decent’ car.  Naming an amount might be simpler.”

We ended up agreeing on the “excellent” price which was more than I expected, but still laughably little.  It didn’t even matter to me that I probably could have gotten more in court.  It was an instant relief to have the matter settled on friendly terms. 

I joked with the arbiter on the way out that I never should have named the car “Roadrunner.”

She gave me a horrified look and said, “You named it Roadrunner?  Like in the cartoon?  And a safe fell on your car?  Girl, you better be careful of what you wish for and certain of what you want.”

The response stunned me so much that I fell back.  Now everyone was ahead of me except the woman with the laptop.  She hadn’t spoken during our meeting, and I assumed she was like a court reported and not supposed to get involved.  Now she slid up to me and gave me a card.  “This is for my aunt.  She does palmistry and reads the cards.  Maybe you should talk to her about what you got.”

“What do you mean?”

The woman just rolled her eyes.  “That’s what I mean.”  Then she gave me a smile that was half a frown and looked sort of like a frog’s face in a cartoon.  I was left baffled in a long white corridor in city hall.

The address on the card wasn’t far away.  Even if I didn’t believe in fortune telling, it seemed like my only lead on a lot questions I barely knew how to ask. 

 

The address on the card turned out to be a room off of a laundromat.  There was a neon sign in the shape of a hand hanging in the window, but nothing else advertised the business.

I entered a room where a neatly dressed black woman in a light blue sweater sat reading a magazine.  We looked at each other and I held out the card.  “Your niece gave me this.”

“Please sit.  You don’t believe, do you?”

That guess certainly didn’t impress me.  She got up to shut the door.  With the sound of the laundromat muffled, I could hear faint strains of jazz in the background.  I wasn’t quite sure if they were playing in this room or in whatever room shared the next wall, but it was a welcome improvement. 

“I don’t know what I believe anymore, but strange things keep happening to me.”

“Since you moved to Emeryville?”

I figured that was still a fairly easy guess, but I nodded.

“You can call me Nona.”  She removed a couple of magazines from her desk and spread a black scarf between us.  “Palm or cards?”

“Could I just ask you a few questions?”

She shook her head like a shiver.  “That’s not how it works.  We don’t share the secrets of others, only what comes from yourself.  The Tarot might tell you about other forces acting on you.”

I guess I’d read too many creepy stories with Tarot cards.  I felt rigidly afraid when she mentioned them.  “No, how much is it for palm reading?”

Without looking at all put off she said, “Twenty to start, in that box,” and she pointed at a gigantic metal box in the corner.  It looked like a book drop at a library, and I was somewhat amused as I put the money in.”

Nona sat on her side of the black cloth and I on mine.  I gave her my hand, and she traced her finger across and then asked to see my left hand as well.  “You seem to be at a time of change.  Did you move recently?”

I nodded. 

“And bad things started happening as soon as you arrived?”

“A safe fell on my car, and then the person giving me a ride home sort of crashed, so I guess you can say that.  Now they’ve changed the crosswalk guy at that intersection.”

She raised an eyebrow at that.

“Not the little one.  The big one on the utility box.”

“Which one was it?”

“The one juggling.  They replaced him with one shining a flashlight into himself.”

“Now that’s interesting.  You’ve moved from denial into reinventing yourself.  The fact that they changed and you noticed makes them symbolic for you, almost like having your cards read.”

“Does the city replace them a lot?”

“Not relevant.  Your lifeline is very uncertain.  Have you ever been in a near death situation or considered suicide?”

I wasn’t ready to talk about wanting to die before I left Lance, but this let me introduce questions about the strange goings on in Emeryville.  “Last Wednesday, the night of the full moon, some DNA cult tried to kidnap me and then trapped me inside a DNA sculpture.  I don’t know what they intended.”

She nodded as if this was entirely the sort of things she expected, which I took as part of the game.

“Would they have tried to kill me?”

“Perhaps,” she said, stroking my life lines on both hands, almost like a form of massage.   “More likely, you were choosing between paths that might lead to different outcomes.”

“What if a werewolf chose for me?”

Nona stopped stroking my hands and was still as she said, “You have a werewolf after you?”

“Well, I’m not sure if he’s after me.  I think he’s on my side, or maybe neutral.”

Finally, she looked at me as if she was really listening.  “It’s not wise to deal with werewolves.”

“But if it’s affecting my lifeline already?”

“That is bad.”

“And the DNA cult would be better?”

“I know nothing of whatever group you call a cult, but the werewolves are real and they don’t like for anyone to identify them.”

“One of the cult guys was calling him ‘wolfboy.’  That’s what tipped me off.”

“Very rude.  Either you’re dealing with more than a simple ‘cult’ or those people are foolish and will not be players by the next full moon.”

“So the werewolves, they don’t really turn into wolves do they?”

“You claim to have seen one under the full moon.”

“Yeah well, his skin was all covered, and it was cloudy.”

“You are lucky.”

“Do you think it’s raining more in the evenings than it used to?”

“That doesn’t have anything to do—Wait.  You always live where it rains.”

“No, I grew up in sunny California.”

“Since puberty?”

“Well, maybe since I went to college.”

“And what brought you to Emeryville?”

“A job.”

“Is that all?”

“Well, maybe a divorce.”

“You are a rain spirit, tangled up with a werewolf, and maybe something more.  I think it is better I don’t read your cards.  It would probably be better for your life if you left Emeryville, but I fear you are tied to this place already.”  She stood and started to slide the black cloth off the table.

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t you feel it?  This is a place of power.  You, me, the werewolf, maybe even your ‘cult’ are all more powerful here.”

“What kind of power do you think I have?”

“Elemental.  Water.  Change.  You may be one of the few people able to get what you want in life, if you know what that is.”

“If only it were that simple.”  I was standing now, too.

“Do you really want it to be?”  She nodded at the box where I’d paid the twenty dollars before.  “You should go now.  I have nothing more to give you.”

I put another twenty in the box on my way out.  Nona seemed to expect it.   Maybe she even believed she’d told me something useful.  I was less sure of what I believed, or of what I wanted, than I had been when I arrived.

 

Thursday

There was a squirrel tail on the sidewalk in front of my house when I came home from work.  I got a plastic bag and picked it up without touching it, the way people pick up dog droppings.  Then I took it to the nearest park, even though I had to walk several blocks, and threw it away there.  Maybe I’m freaking out a bit, but I didn’t want it anywhere near my house.

 

Friday

Another squirrel tail was waiting when I came home.  I definitely freaked out.  I ran inside and told Judy about both tails and how Toni might know more about them.  She told me to take the latest tail to the park garbage while she called for a book group special meeting.

 

When we arrived at Neverland, Emma led us to the little library room where we met the first time.  I felt cozy in with all the books and no windows.  Toni was already there, but she said we should wait until others arrived.  Emma brought cheese and crackers and everyone started talking about cats and craft projects.  I thought I’d tear my hair out, but Judy told me to eat something and calm down.  I ate about a dozen crackers with cheese, and it did calm me down a bit.  I think there’s something in cheese that does that.

Eventually we had six people, the five I’d met on my first visit and the woman who’d been reading that junk DNA might trigger schizophrenia or cerebral palsy.  It turned out her name was Lucinda, which didn’t seem to fit her at all.  She was a tiny, mousy little woman with bifocals.  She asked me how long I’d been in the group, and I said about three weeks.

Toni finally got the meeting started by saying, “Can we hear about the squirrel tails now?”

Everyone looked at me, so I began.  “When I came home yesterday there was a squirrel tail in front of our apartment building.  I’d twice heard Toni mention seeing them, but I’d never seen a squirrel tail, I mean, without the rest of the squirrel, except with Toni.  And lots of other weird stuff has happened since I moved here, so I guess I was a little freaked out.  Anyway, I used a plastic bag to pick it up and walked to the nearest park to throw it away.  Then today there was another squirrel tail in almost exactly the same place, and Judy was home, so I told her, and here we are.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t the same squirrel tail?” Tony asked.

“Taken out of the plastic bag in the garbage at the park and brought back to my house?  I hope not.  And it didn’t particularly smell, which it might have if it was old.”

“So we’re dealing with a serial squirrel killer,” LiMei joked. 

I laughed, I guess mostly to be polite.  No one else did.

Emma said, “Let’s try to keep our minds open to the possibilities here.  Celia, you said other weird stuff had happened?”

“Well, the day I arrived a safe fell on my car, which admittedly was named Roadrunner.  When Judy came to get me, her car ran into the utility box, which incidentally had one of the crosswalk guys painted on it, which later got swapped for another crosswalk guy, which a fortune teller told me could be read sort of like Tarot.  You know the crosswalk guy art I mean, on all the utility boxes in Emeryville?”

“Is that all?” Emma asked.

“Well, I also tried to rescue a bag lady who was being beaten up by some thugs.  She told me to go hide in a mall, where I ran into a guy I’d had a one night stand with who spotted one of the thugs following me.  He seemed to think I should hide by buying new clothes, trying on perfume, and talking to lots of salespeople.”

Emma and a couple others nodded.

“Oh, and I’d met the bag lady before on the same night I met the one night stand guy who also might be what some people call a werewolf—“

Emma gasped but quickly covered her mouth.

“We’ll get to that.  Anyway, I had a message delivered to work on the night of the full moon telling me to meet this possible werewolf.  I found him strapped to a table in a basement room, evidently with his full consent, but then two thugs showed up with guns, so I let him free.  He took out the thugs but was obnoxious to me.  So I ran away as it started to rain and tried to hide in a house party.  Toni once told me there was something bad about house parties in Emeryville.  But a sculptor that LiMei and I knew from The Forge was there, and I thought that was a good thing, until he trapped me in his trash can DNA sculpture.  It turned out to be part of some weird cult ceremony or something, probably what the thugs meant to take me to in the first place.  Anyway, the cult guys were the ones who used the term ‘wolfboy’ when the guy showed up and sort of rescued me.  And the fortune teller I talked to seemed to think he was a werewolf, but didn’t necessarily turn into a wolf for real.  And she thought I was some kind of water spirit, maybe because of the rain.  We had a major storm the first night I met the possible werewolf, too.”

“Is that everything?” Emma asked.

At the same moment Judy asked, “When did you consult a fortune teller?”

“When I met with the arbiter, and she found out I’d named my car ‘Roadrunner’, she said I shouldn’t have and that I should be careful what I wish for, or what I want, or something like that.  Then the person who’d typed notes during the arbitration gave me a card for the fortune teller.  So I don’t know, I went.”

“The arbiter was probably Geraldine,” Emma said.

“That’s right.”

“You certainly seem to have a lot of luck,” Emma said.

“Some of it bad,” Toni added.

“Did you notice,” the mousy woman, Lucinda, put in, “That the crosswalk men in Emeryville might fit with the local art that Judy had been studying.  The squirrel tales were Toni’s latest research.  The garbage can DNA sculpture fits curiously with my junk DNA book.  Then the rain could tie to Emma’s climate change book.  Li Mei, I’m sorry, what did you talk about Saturday?”

Li Mei said, “Birds and how some of them may sense the earth’s magnetic field.  How scientists are making maps of the magnetic field now, at a high level of detail.  It could relate to anything happening in this area.  I checked, and we have an unusually strong magnetic field right around Berkeley and Emeryville.”

Lucinda nodded and smiled. “Sounds pretty convergent to me.  You were reading fiction about magic and science fiction, right?  And now you’re struggling with what to believe, and here we all are.”

“But shouldn’t there be convergence with the people who came Saturday who aren’t here today?” Judy  asked.

“Maybe there is some, but it’s not as strong.  I mean, the sky book could also relate to rain, and the story with the cat shape changer could also relate to a cat leaving squirrel tales.  What were the others?”

“The Odyssey and a biography of Steve Jobs,” Toni said.

“Well, the first could go with Celia having a series of adventures and the second could connect to anything in the Bay Area, or maybe those are parts we don’t know about yet.”

“Or non-convergence,” Li Mei said.  “It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

“I know.  We still need to recruit a couple more members.”

“What about Ruth at The Forge?” I asked.

“Wasn’t she a friend of the sculptor who trapped you?” Li Mei asked.

“I don’t think they’re that close.  She didn’t seem to know anything about it on Saturday.”

“You know this person, too?” Emma asked Li Mei.

“Yeah, Celia and I went out to lunch with her a week ago.  She might be okay.  We could talk to her over lunch again.”

“Okay.”

“What about the fortune teller?” Lucinda asked.  I’d be happy to visit her and see what she’s like.

“That’s reaching a bit,” Emma said.  “But we’re each free agents.”

“I know who—” Toni said.

“We only need two more,” Lucinda cut in.

“No, the cat.  I know who the cat person is.  It’s the bag lady.  She could be carrying the squirrel tales in all her bag lady stuff.  She could be a familiar for the people who throw bad parties in Emeryville.  I’ve heard them talk about using cats as familiars, I just didn’t know the cats were people.  But if werewolves don’t really turn into wolves—”

“Shhhhh.  Don’t talk about them,” Emma said.

“Why not?”

“Nobody does.”

“The people at those parties do.”

“I thought you avoided parties in Emeryville,” I said.

“That’s because they tried to get me into one of their weird DNA things once.  Those guys are all creeps.  And their all guys, too.  They call themselves wizards and talk about sex magic and the resonance of DNA leading to magic.  They use cats, that maybe aren’t cats, as familiars to deliver and find things for them, and they think werewolves are aberrations that they can weed out of human DNA with their magic.”

“Did they actually use you in a ceremony?” I asked.

“No.  They were using a bed as an alter in that one, and I’m not that stupid.”

“Was it a full moon?”

Toni thought for a moment.  “It might have been.  It was very bright when I walked home.”

“And they didn’t bug you after that?”

“No.  I sort of kicked the guy who brought be in the groin when I took off, so I figured that had been enough to discourage him.”

“If they let you leave, why would they be sending me squirrel tails?”

“You said they sent their first messenger to your work.  Maybe they’re not sending the tails to you but using them to mark where you live.  Maybe the cats only communicate that way.”

“The bag lady can talk.”

“Maybe not when she’s a cat, figuratively.”

“I’m not sure I buy any of this cat and werewolf stuff,” Li Mei said.

“I’m not sure I do either,” I said.  “Or at least, I don’t know what they mean any more than these guys calling themselves wizards.”

“You’re still not sure about magic,” Emma said.  “Just keep your mind open.  Sometimes it doesn’t matter if one person explains a phenomenon with science and one with magic.  We have to keep ourselves open to whatever convergences we find and make the best informed decisions we can.”

“I think you should talk to the cat,” said Toni.

“And tell her what?” I asked.

“Tell her to stop leaving those tails.  Ask her who she’s working for if you can.”

“What if she doesn’t know anything about it?”

“Then she’ll think you’re weird.  If she’s a bag lady, she probably knows all about weird people.  It’s amazing what you see on the street.”

“And if we believe the guys who call themselves wizards are still trying to find me, what should I do about that?”

“Keep moving the tails and maybe get a restraining order,” Emma suggested.

“You should ask the werewolf,” Toni put in.  Then she said, “Shhhh,” just as Emma was saying it.

 

Saturday

I kept my eyes open for the bag lady on my way to The Forge.

Once there, I was caught up in the whirl of kid activity until after class when I invited Ruth to lunch with Li Mei and me.  We ended up at all you can eat dim sum in Oakland’s Chinatown, and while it wasn’t the best, it was cheap with lots of choices.

I piled my plate with shrimp, that turned out to be a bad choice, and steamed pork buns, that were divine.  There were all sorts of little dumplings, salads, and mostly American desserts, so we all went back and forth and the conversations stayed pretty light.

Then Ruth brought up that she worked with Emeryville Public Art.

“They wouldn’t have anything to do with all those paintings of the crosswalk guy doing amazing and bizarre things?”

“They would.  I had a small hand in that myself, since it was led as a series of workshops for high school students.”

“Those crosswalk guys are my favorite thing about Emeryville,” I said.  “But why do they change them?”

“What do you mean?”

“There used to be one with the guy juggling three heads, and they switched in one where he’s shining  a flashlight down into himself.”

“That’s odd.  I hadn’t heard of any of the swapping before.  We had one taken off and replaced with a blank panel due to very destructive vandalism, but mostly people are respectful of our public art.  I hadn’t heard of anything recent.  Maybe there was another incident and they moved a picture instead, though I can’t imagine why.”

“Huh.  I didn’t know they were all one of a kind.”  I wondered if it had anything to do with the people who’d tried to kidnap me and then realized I was being paranoid.  “You didn’t ever hear anything about Al or his DNA art, did you?”

“You asked about that last week.  I hadn’t heard anything then, but recently there was a rumor that some guy from a rival gang damaged it and Al was going after him.  He’s been banned from The Forge for fighting, and I heard his family was annoyed and thought he should leave town for a while as well.”

“Al’s in a gang?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t have said so before.  I thought they were more likely wannabe’s or kids who should know better but wanted to look tough.  I probably shouldn’t spread rumors.”

I didn’t know what to say.  Li Mei was chewing patiently and gave me a look as if to say it was my call.

“Really, I was there when the art got knocked over, and it wasn’t what I would call a gang thing, more like some weird science cult or some sort of ritual.  And if Al’s after the guy who knocked it over, that guy is sort of a friend of mine, and Al’s friends had trapped me inside that sculpture at the time.”

There followed a long, confused time of me trying to explain but not learning much else that might help Scott.  LiMei eventually told Ruth about the book group, but I took that chance to excuse myself and went to phone Scott on my newly replaced phone.  It went to voicemail, so I just said, “I heard a rumor that the guy who made the DNA sculpture is out to get you.  Call me.”

It was hard to leave it at that, but I tried not to worry as I went back to LiMei and Ruth.  By then we had a tray of fortune cookies, and mine said, “Opportunity awaits you.”  I shook my head and ate the cookie.

 

On the way home, I decided to try a random walk in the general direction of my apartment.  It was how I’d found the bag lady last time.  Even if I didn’t believe magic would help me find her, I figured my subconscious might have ideas about what sorts of streets she frequented.  I wandered and wanted and kept my eyes open.  Then I felt like a particular street might be good for the bag lady.  It was that sort of “seems right” feeling I usually took for granted, but now it made my stomach turn.  I followed my instincts past a medium sized coffee shop called Sacred Grounds, and in the next doorway, I found her dozing with her head on a gap bag.

I coughed and she looked at me.  It would be easy to characterize her as a cat with that, “Who me nap?” look on her face.  But I tried not to get carried away.

“Hi, remember me?  We met a couple times.”

She put her hand on her umbrella.  “I remember.”

“My name’s Celia.  What’s your name?”  I held my hand out.

“Why are you trying to make nice?  What do you want?”

“Someone’s been leaving squirrel tails in front of my apartment.  I was hoping you’d know who or why.”

“Maybe.  What’s in it for me?”  She knew.  It was written on her face even as I tried to keep the excitement off mine.

“We could get hot chocolate together and talk a while.”

“Phhhh.  I’m not that cheap a date.  You give me ten dollars, I’ll buy my own hot chocolate and a meal or two.”

“Okay.”  I pulled out a ten dollar bill and gave it to her.  She tucked it into her many layers of clothing somewhere.

“What makes you think I know anything?”

I thought of a rational argument, like that she was out on the street in this area a lot and probably people didn’t worry too much about what she saw.  Instead I said, “I have a sixth sense about these things.”

“Finally you get some sense about something.  I’ll make it stop?”  She asked like it was a question.

“How?”

“Can’t tell you that.”

“Were you leaving them?”

She lowered her eyelids and glared at me.

“Can you tell me what they mean?”

“Why should I?”

“Another two meals?” I produced two fives, because I didn’t have another ten.

“You can’t buy me.”

“If you tell me, I won’t tell anyone you said it.  If I have to figure it out myself, then I might say you told me instead of the truth.”

“Tricksy Wight!”

I had no idea what she meant, since even living rough, it was pretty clear she was white, too.  Then just as I was giving up and thinking I wouldn’t get any real information after all she said.  “It just tells all of them where you live.  But you picked them up before the witching hour, so I had to do it again.”

I gave her the fives.

“Don’t you mention me, or I’ll get you.”

“Just don’t tell them where I am or leave anything more.”

“We all work for bad people, but I won’t tell if you don’t.”

She made the fives disappear, and I knew I was supposed to leave.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Rachel,” she said.  “You can call me Rachel.”

“Thanks, Rachel.”

“Don’t use it up.”

I nodded, and made my way home, not too directly.

 

Scott didn’t call back all day.  I refused to call him, but by eight I couldn’t help taking a walk to Natialie’s.  My desire for chocolate was real, as well, but when I saw him seated in our usual place, a warm relief hit me faster than the change from outside temperature. 

He nodded as I came in, but it was very nonchalant, so I went and ordered my chocolates without actually speaking.

I went and sat beside him, “Good to see you.”

He nodded again, and I wasn’t sure if he’d wanted to see me or not.  Still, he was here, and after last Saturday night, he couldn’t claim to be surprised if we met up.

“Did you get my message?”

“Yes.”

“Did you already know Al was after you?”

He tilted his head in a way I took as a probable yes, and suddenly, I was deeply angry at him.

“I was worried about you.”

“Don’t.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“Ideally?  You should probably move back to Washington.”

“Fat chance, but I can choose another night to get chocolate.”  I got up to leave.  I hadn’t touched my chocolates, but I felt tears rising behind my eyes.

Out I went.  The cold stung my face and the warm tears spilled over.  I walked without looking back and shoved my hands in my pockets.  Then I heard pounding feet behind me and didn’t think fast enough to run.

Maybe I wanted to be caught.

His hand closed on my elbow.  “Look, you don’t have to leave without your chocolate.”

“I don’t care.”  I tried to keep the sound of crying out of my voice and keep walking.  But then he stepped in front of me and saw the tears.  In that moment, it started to rain, without a visible cloud in the sky.

“Shit,” he said looking up.  Then he looked at me.  “I didn’t mean—” he waved a hand as if to brush my tears away but stopped a few inches from my face.  “I never meant to make you unhappy.”

“By telling me to leave town?”

“I meant to protect you.”

I gave an unladylike snort as my nose had clogged up with the tears, but why should I care.

“And you meant to protect me, I know.  I’m sorry.  Please come back and finish your chocolate.”

He looked at me, and it was like the day we met all over again.  I let him walk me back to the chocolate shop, his hand still on my arm.

I wiped at my tears and hoped the rain and cold would wash the signs away.

Back in the shop, we returned to our usual seats.  The woman at the counter tried to pretend she wasn’t looking.  It was a different person from the last two times and I wondered if they had trouble keeping staff or just rotated the Saturday night shift because no one wanted it.  I didn’t want to look at Scott.  I had no idea what to say.

“I knew you’d find me here,” he said.

“And while you’d be safer to leave town or at least stop seeing me, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Do you actually care?  You left the first time without a note.”  I lowered my voice to a whisper, “I have no idea what was going on the second time, but I think you rescued me from something.”

“You rescued me, too.  I’ve revised my theory that they were after you and using me as bait to thinking they were after both of us.  So it’s good you freed my hand, and I’m sorry if I was a jerk that night on the street.”

“What’s with you?”

“That is the crux of it.”  He paused and looked off into the glassed off factory room.  “I truly can’t tell you.  You truly are safer not knowing and possibly leaving town.  I fear you know too much already, and I fear you have a propensity to learn more.”

“Fear my propensity to learn.”

He smiled.  I couldn’t help remembering how magical our night together had seemed before he left without a note.  Magical.  That was the crux of the problem.

“The reason you can’t tell me, is it something to do with magic?”

He tilted his head and smiled.  “Why don’t we start with what I can tell you, and see if that causes you to storm out again.  Would you like to drink your hot chocolate first?”

I took a sip.  It was not some sweet, easily left behind chocolate.  I could almost imagine the crop of beans and how no other batch of chocolate would ever be quite the same.  “I guess I’m too curious for that.  Do tell.”

“I did some checking, and your work email is not secure.  I’m not sure if someone inside your company or outside is diverting copies, but I’d appreciate you not writing when you’re meeting me.  I worried that if your email was snooped then your phone might be as well, but I wasn’t able to check that thoroughly, so I came here rather than replying.”

The silence stretched.  I sipped my chocolate and made him wait.  Part of me was definitely pissed that he’d snooped my email.  I waited for that part to pull forward and exert some rational control over the voice in my mind that shouted gleefully that he’d implied we might be meeting in the future.

“What caused you to check my email?”

“Can’t say.”

“Is there a rule book?”

“Yes.”

“But I can’t read it?”

“Secret oral tradition and all that.”

“But it allows you to meet with me and possibly save my life?”

“Evidently.”  He shrugged, looking for all the world like he was flirting.

“Are their only rules about what you can tell me?”

“More than that.”

“Are you going to make me ask explicitly what else is off limits?”

“I thought you’d be so pissed at me it wouldn’t come up?”

I raised an eyebrow, and he said, “Unintentional.”

I couldn’t help but smile and wait until he said, “I really thought you’d never want to speak to me again.  If I were a better person, I’d probably work harder and make you hate me.”

“So why don’t you?”

“I think we both know.”

And at that moment, the door of the chocolate shop opened, and the loudest alarm I’d ever heard went off.  The noise might have rattled me off my chair if Scott hadn’t leapt forward pushing both me and my chair to the floor.  By then I’d seen the big man in the doorway with a gun in his hand.  The barista was crouched behind the counter and had presumably hit the alarm.

Scott leapt off of me and was going to rush the guy with the gun, a move I recognized as stupid even if I was still lying on the floor.  Then the emergency sprinklers went off and in the moment when the guy with the gun was distracted, Scott made his move and managed to knock the gun away.  It skidded under a counter of chocolate gift boxes.  I appreciated how hard it would be to fish out from underneath as I realized the sprinklers were ruining all that chocolate.

Then there were more thugs pounding on the front door, which was only glass, but had evidently locked when the alarm went off.  I saw the barista shut herself in a storage closet and was thinking it might be a good strategy when I saw that big guy punch Scott in the stomach hard enough to throw him up against another counter of elegant chocolates.  I don’t know what got into me, but I pushed off the wall and straight into the guy’s legs.  It never would have worked if the floor hadn’t been wet, but his size must have pulled him further off balance, and he crashed into the front glass counter raining glass onto the one set of chocolates that hadn’t been destroyed by the sprinklers.  The big guy appeared to be out for the count.

Scott grabbed my hand and pulled me past the closet the barista had hidden in.  I found myself in a single person bathroom that I hadn’t known was there. 

“Out the window,” Scott said, and sure enough, the window above the toilet was open and possibly large enough to escape through.

“What if some of the guys from the front door loop around?”

“Hope they don’t.”

“Couldn’t we just wait for the police?”

“I’m not,” he said.  In an instant he climbed up on the toilet tank, pulled out the screen, and started climbing through.

“Wait for me,” I said, and I followed him.

We ran off into the now pouring rain as sirens approached from a distance.

“Won’t the barista tell them who we were?”

“Didn’t you pay cash?”

I nodded.

“Well, we would have needed to find a new meeting place anyway.  I left that window open just in case, but I wasn’t sure you’d find me if I went somewhere unexpected.”

Still running, he grabbed my hand.  “Speaking of unexpected, do you object to lying a little to get a free trial at Fitness Focus?”

“Whatever,” I said, and he pulled me though another glass door into a big orange building labeled “Fitness Focus”.

Inside, we slowed abruptly, still holding hands.  Scott ran his free hand though his hair and led me casually to the front desk where he said, “I heard you had a free trial offer for couples?”

 “We sure do!” the perky blond bubbled, and right after Scott had declared us a couple.  “Just fill this out.”

Scott scrawled out a trial membership form at record speed.  I admit I peaked enough to see he listed us as Scott and Celia Hammer of 3467 63rdSt., Emeryville.  Whatever pleasure I’d felt at pretending to be a couple was squashed as I realized the address was where I’d found him strapped to a table.  Still, he produced ID that was good enough for the blond.  She gave us each a little paper card and a folder of information to share.

“I don’t suppose you carry a swimsuit in your bag?” Scott asked as we approach the gym café and shop.

“Not even when I lived in a beach town.”

“If I bought you one as a gift, would you care to soak in a hot tub?”

I glanced at him and at the shop.  “I’ll buy my own, but the hot tub sounds okay.”

We each bought out own overpriced but cheaply made swimsuits and then walked down the hall towards the locker rooms.  He whispered before we split up, “If you put your clothes through the swimsuit spinner now and hang them up in a locker, they might be partly dry by the time you leave.

I went into the women’s locker room wondering if my phone could possibly be bugged.  I felt like I should call someone to say where I was, but then I worried there could be some kind of passive GPS tracking, so I turned the phone off instead.  I put my clothes through the spinner as Scott suggested before heading out to the hot tub in my new swimsuit.

Somehow, Scott was the only person soaking when I got there.  I wondered if he’d chased everyone else away, or if others at this gym were just more fitness minded.  There were at least a dozen people swimming laps, and most of them looked pretty fit.

I climbed in near enough to talk, but not so our knees or any other parts were touching.

“So shy after all that?”

“We are in public.”

“You could set the sprinklers on them.”

For a moment, my mind denied knowing what he was talking about.  Then something in me gave in, at least to the metaphore, and I asked, “Are there specific rules for werewolves and water spirits?”

“You’ve made another leap in your terminology.”

“You knew?”

“Before the sprinklers, it was more of a guess.”

“Would you have rescued me otherwise?”

“We seem to have a knack for rescuing each other, but no, I was laying even odds that I’d get shot before I hit that guy.”

“Could you have taken him out if he didn’t have the gun?”

“Did you see the size of that guy?”

“I saw the ones lying on the floor when you last jumped out a window.”

“That was then.  This is now.”

“Meaning no full moon?”

“Meaning whatever you want it to mean.”

“I want it to mean there’s no rule again consenting relations between werewolves and water spirits.”

I leaned in to kiss him, and he pulled away.

“Really, we shouldn’t.”

“But it’s not against the rules?”

“Do you remember what a jerk I was that night?”

“Is that why you had yourself strapped to a table?”

“Did you have people chasing you with guns where you used to live?”

“No, I was withering away from lack of ever speaking to anyone.”

“It’s hard to imagine you withering away.”

“Fading?  Wishing myself away?”

“Please don’t,” he grabbed my hand underwater.  It sent a shock like electricity though me, and I thought of electric eels.

“You really think I could?”

“Do you still want to?”

“Not at the moment.”

He almost let go of my hand, but then he grew very serious.  “I don’t know how we got this far, but if being disappointed by me is going to cause those thoughts, it would be better not to start.  At best, I can only be a bit of fun, nothing lasting.”

“Is that what you call what we had, a bit of fun?  That night was like nothing I’d ever experienced.”

“I don’t know that it would ever be like that again.”

“We could find out.”

“If I’d been paying attention that first night, I never would have started this. Even tonight, I thought it would be goodbye.  Perhaps I don’t know what powers I’m messing with, but…”

“But?”

“I fear our lives have become a bit entangled?”

“And you fear that?”

“It seems to involve guys with guns two times out of four.”

I squeezed his hand.  “If the pattern holds, next time we’re safe.”

“Nothing is that predictable, but I’ll do what I can to make it so.”

“I think meeting at Natalie’s would be pushing our luck.”

“And I’m afraid I can’t ever invite you to my place.”

“I have company coming next weekend, but I think Judy’s gone the weekend after that.  I could make you dinner.”

“You cook, too?”

“Don’t expect much.”  I looked at our hands still connected underwater, and realized that while all but two swimmers had left the lap pool, no one had come near the hot tub.  Was it just the couple vibe or was there something to all this talk of magic?  I was beginning to believe almost anything.  But if so, what was I getting myself into?  “Are there any rules I should know about what you eat?”

He threw back his head and laughed much too hard in my opinion, but then he said, “No.  I don’t care for cilantro.”

“I’ve never used it.”

“Anything’s fine then.”

I didn’t  know what to say next, and a voice over a loud speaker said, “Fitness Focus will be closing in fifteen minutes.  The hot tub and pool are now closed.”

“Is that my fault?” I asked.

“They close at midnight.”

“It’s midnight?”

“11:45.  Come on.”  He kept hold of my hand to help me out of the hot tub, but then he let go.

I couldn’t let him disappear into the men’s locker room without asking, “So we’re going home separately?”

“I’ll walk you part way.”  Maybe I imagined it, but it seemed like he didn’t want to go home alone either.  “Meet you in the lobby.”

I took a quick shower and put my new swimsuit in a plastic bag provided next to the towels.  While my jeans were wet and cold, the rest of my clothing was close to dry, so I didn’t feel too ridiculous putting it on.  Unfortunately, the gym didn’t provide combs, and I’d lost mine, so I fumbled my hair into a tangled braid and went out to the lobby.

Scott was there, holding his coat over his arm.  He opened the door for me, and we stepped out into the chill of air cleared after a storm.  Suddenly, my shirt didn’t seem so dry and it chilled the skin anywhere it touched.

Scott held out his jacket.  “You’ll freeze.”

“I’m fine.”

“Is that a w—”

“Leave it, please?  Just let me be nice to you for a while.”

I took his jacket and though it was damp, it completely blocked the chill.  “Thanks.”

He put his arm around me and started to walk vaguely in the direction of my apartment.  It wasn’t a direct route, and I still didn’t know the area that well.  I found myself wishing we could walk all night.  It was as if there was nothing left to say, but instead of feeling we couldn’t talk, I felt like a conversation of intentions and desires passed between our bodies as we walked together.

When we finally stopped, I was surprised to find myself just a block and a half from home.  We’d ended on the far side from where we began, and still around a corner, out of sight.

“Stay with me?” I said.

“You’ve kept me long enough already.”

“But you want to, and it’s not against the rules, is it?”

“It’s a really bad idea.  Please don’t try to talk me into it tonight.”

“Maybe next time?”

“Maybe.  Keep my jacket until then.”

I should have argued.  I was pretty sure he was cold and would get colder on the way home, but I liked the idea of keeping his jacket.  I had some romantic fifties notion of girls wearing their boyfriends’ letter jackets, I guess, and it was so warm now.

Then he kissed me, a simple kiss goodnight, but I could have sworn there were inexplicable colors just waiting to rush in.

He pulled away.  “Goodnight.  Be safe.”

I forced myself to walk away as he did.

 

Sunday

While I slept, I dreamed about Scott.  When I woke up, I wanted him beside me and wanted to call him.  By the time I was dressed, I was pissed that he’d hacked my email, and I wanted to call and ask him all sorts of questions that I should have asked the night before.  The problem was, I believed him enough not to want to use my phone.

By the time I’d put jam on toast, I’d decided to buy another phone.  I wasn’t going to get my recently replaced one or my existing number, but I’d heard drug dealers paid cash for cheap phones with prepaid minutes.  If I had something like that, then I wouldn’t have to worry about calling Scott.  Or at least I wouldn’t have to worry about it for security reasons.  It was still probably a desperate and stupid thing to do, but I could worry about that after I bought a phone.

I walked out into a morning that was bright and scrubbed.  The streets and bushes still shimmered from the rain and the air was needle cold but carried no smell of garbage or exhaust.  I didn’t even see any cars for the first few blocks, until I turned onto a major street that led to a strip mall.

 

It was there that I saw the utilities workers replacing the yellow door with the crystal ball crosswalk guy.  The new one showed crosswalk guy walking along a mobius strip.  The workers looked official, with orange reflective vests that said “Emeryville Utilities” and a white truck that said the same.  I walked up and asked, “Is something wrong with the power?”

“No, just some order to swap the doors.”

“Why?”

“Who knows,” the guy actually working said.

The one standing beside said, “Probably something with the art council.  Once in a while we get a call to swap two doors.  This time they want us to rotate six.  But hey, they pay us to work.”

“They pay you to stand around,” his partner put in.

“Nice work if you can get it.”

I thanked them and moved on.

 

Once I had my disposable phone, the urge to call Scott returned, but not as strongly as before.  Luckily, the phone would have to be charged and activated before I could use it, and I planned to have fully recovered my senses by then and to not call Scott at all.  Great as he’d been in bed, and mysteriously annoying as he was the rest of the time, I was determined not to be some pathetic girl chasing some mysterious guy.

Anyway, my niece was coming to visit in a week, so I started shopping for supplies.  I’d seen Marie only briefly the last summer, because Lance and I had just split up, and I didn’t have a place of my own yet.  Before that, she’d come to stay with me a week or three every summer since she was ten.  For years those weeks had been the highlight of my calendar.  I didn’t regret not having kids of my own, but Marie was one of the best people I’d ever met.  At ten she’d talked her parents into fostering rescue kittens (and my sister had never been a cat person).  The next year I think she’d expanded to placing foster kittens with Girl Scout volunteers, and the year after that she was volunteering at a kids’ zoo and science center near her house.  She’d gone through a phase of wanting to be an animal trainer, before becoming entranced with Japanese robotic pets and drifting into a world of high school robotics competitions and internships.  All the while she kept adding in ways to save unwanted animals, the planet, kids from poor school districts or poor countries.  And as far as I could tell, she was also a sincerely nice person who took care of her friends and even saw something worthwhile in her drop out aunt who lived in the middle of nowhere.  Now she was a freshman at Carnegie Mellon, and she was coming to visit me the first weekend of her winter vacation, before she even went home to her parents and friends.  Even if I had given her the plane tickets as a birthday gift, I felt honored that she still wanted to spend time with me.

I picked up popcorn and good hot chocolate mix, but then I was stuck.  It was too soon to buy many fresh foods, and I hadn’t decided what to cook for her either.  Maybe I could try out something new, and if it worked, I’d make it for Scott the next week.

Thinking of Scott so much was starting to irritate me.  It also made me paranoid about the wizards’ thugs or whoever had come after us last night.  Part of my brain shied away from thinking any sort of magic could be real.  I’d certainly seen no evidence of it from the wizards or the so-called werewolf, although Scott’s role in the DNA sculpture fight seemed unlikely whenever I thought about it.  The parts that I could think somewhat clearly about and that weirded me out the most, were those where I seemed to make it rain, especially if I’d made the sprinklers come on in the chocolate shop.  I couldn’t think of any way it was possible, but it seemed like rain, or falling water, or even a falling safe, happened unusually often around me, especially when Scott and I were together.  The same feeling I’d had when searching for the bag lady, Rachel, seemed to settle around me and whisper that deep down I saw some truth in the idea of magic.

I went and bought more chocolate.

 

That evening, with my new phone charged, I walked around the neighborhood, taking pictures of all the crosswalk guy art I could find.  The only ones I knew for sure had changed, were the three nearest my house.  The flashlight guy on my way to work had been replaced with a pigeon on a wire whose shadow was the crosswalk guy.  I’d seen the utility workers installing mobius guy.  And on the other side of the park, the new crosswalk guy had wings and was shown mid-launch.  If they really could be read like tarot cards, would those represent hiding, getting lost, and escape?  Or made deceit, pointlessness, and retreat?

The workers had said they were rotating six, so I could only assume the original three near me had gone to wherever these three had been.  I doubted finding the previous three would help my understanding.  There were just too many possibilities.

That night I made lasagna and salad with Judy, but I didn’t tell her what had happened at Natalie’s or about the crosswalk guys.  I did tell her about the bag lady claiming she could stop the squirrel tails and that Ruth seemed interested in joining book group.  Then we talked about my niece coming to visit, and Judy was eager to cook for the night she arrived, Friday, just five days away.

 

Tuesday

After lunch, Don came by my cubicle practically bouncing.  He was herky jerky like a marionette.  In the most sociable mood I’d ever seen from him, he waved some small glossy papers in my face and said, “Marlene wants to see you.  We’ve got shwag.”

As I entered Marlene’s office, she looked much too serious to match Don’s mood, and I noticed her nail polish was now dark amber.

“Come in.  Close the door,” she said.  When I hesitated just inside the door, “Please, have a seat.”

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“That’s what I wanted to ask you.  We had the police by a week ago about someone delivering a message to you here, but I haven’t heard anything from you.  We’re still friends aren’t we?  Maybe I could help?”

“I don’t know.  I was being set up by some DNA cult to be used in a ritual, but it all got confused, and I wasn’t actually hurt.  I guess there will be a trial at some point and I might need time off?”

“Of course, but have you found a lawyer?  Are you having any trauma or stress issues?  I could help you find a lawyer or counseling help, whatever you need.  Has there been any further trouble?”

It was almost as if she knew about the incident at Natalie’s, but that seemed paranoid, even to me.  Maybe paranoia was a symptom of something.  I was suddenly amazed by how little impact two encounters with armed thugs had made on my psyche.  I hadn’t dreamt about them or been afraid to leave my house.  I hadn’t followed up on a restraining order as suggested by my book group. 

“I guess there have been so many changes in my life that that I haven’t really had time to stress about the attack.  I don’t think I’m repressing it or anything.  And I don’t know if I need my own attorney.  The police didn’t mention anything like that, and I think the case is more between the city and that cult, or whatever it was.”

“You should always consult your own representation.  Here,” she started to write on a post it, “I’ll give you the name of our corporate attorney.  Maybe he can recommend someone.”  She passed the note across to me.  “Anything else I should know?”

I shrugged, “Not really.”  There was nothing else I wanted to discuss with her.

“Well, remember, I’m here for you.  Now for the fun part, we have free passes for employees to visit Cirque Scientifique, some show that’s coming to town this Saturday.  It’s a perk from the Emeryville Technology Development Group that we were forced to join, and we might as well get something out of that drink tank.”  I thanked her, thinking Marie might enjoy it, and left her office as quickly as possible.  Something about Marlene was creeping me out, but the feeling faded once I was back in my cube.

 

When I talked with Judy after work, she said she’d told Marlene about the DNA cult when they talked about the plumber.  “I don’t know why she’d act surprised now.”

Judy was editing her first newsletter as Paper PAW PAW, and seemed more than a little distracted.  I almost didn’t say anything but had to ask, “Does Marlene ever seem a little off to you?  Like she seems to have no interest in something one moment and then flip flops later?”

“She always seems very interested in you.  I think that might be the only reason she talks to me, not like she ever asks about my life.”

I didn’t know what to say.  I felt guilty, and yet relieved that Judy didn’t seem to be on Marlene’s side.  “Maybe it’s just the whole in law thing coming between you.”

“Naw.  I can tell when someone looks down on me.  Marlene has always looked way down.  She said from the start that I should keep the spare bedroom available, in case I wanted to sublet.  It’s like she assumed my ex wouldn’t care enough to pay my alimony.”

That wasn’t quite how I’d heard the story.  “How long ago was that?”

“Half a year, maybe, right when she offered this apartment.”

“You wouldn’t know the date, would you?”

“I moved in July 1st.”

Judy went on typing as I wondered if Marlene could have intended to offer me a job way back then.  But it wasn’t possible.  Lance and I had just broken up in June.  Marlene hadn’t known until a couple months ago, and then she’d made the job offer right away.  Still, it didn’t make me feel any better about Marlene to hear how she treated Judy.

“What do you think of this picture?” Judy asked, and I looked over her shoulder at three kittens climbing over each other to get out of a cardboard box.

“They’re adorable.  Do you think you could just not tell Marlene about me anymore?”

“Sure thing,” Judy smiled even as she kept on typing.  “I don’t really like talking to her anyway.  Now what were you saying about free tickets?”

It turned out, we were supposed to have book group Saturday evening, but Judy thought the whole group would be interested in Cirque Scientifique.  I tried to embrace the idea, hoping Marie wouldn’t be overwhelmed by all the people in my life now.  It had been just Lance and me for so long, all the years when she’d been visiting me. 

Then Judy and I fell to planning a special dinner for Friday night, and I was sure Marie would like it.

 

Friday

Marie called from the BART station in San Francisco a little after six.  I walked to meet her at our Bart station and arrived before the train.  She came through the turnstile wearing a scoop neck tee shirt with the perfect cut to show off a new tattoo at her collar bone, a blue and green dragonfly.  I hugged her tight and said, “Nice tattoo!”

“I knew you’d like it,” she hugged back and handed me the smaller of her two bags as we headed for the doors.  “This one’s just temporary.  I’m still trying out ideas.”

Out on the street I saw some thugs under a streetlight and wondered if they were connected to the guys who’d come after Scott and me or the one’s who’d harassed the bag lady.  We were headed away from them, but I couldn’t help looking over my shoulder and being relieved when they hadn’t moved.  Then a few blocks later I had the sense I was being watched.  I looked around but didn’t see anyone.

I walked a little faster and Marie asked, “Are you okay?”

“Just a little nervous.  I’ve had a few hassles with a certain group, but now I’m probably being paranoid.  They’ve never hassled me on the street or when I was alone.”

“What am I, chopped suey?”

“No, I mean, both times I was with this guy, Scott.”

“Scott?”  Her voice went up with a conspiratorial tone, but she waited for me to say what I would.

“Just a friend.  Well… maybe it’s more complicated than that.  I’ll try to explain later.  Anyone new in your life?”

“Seeing as it’s my first semester in college, I should hope so.” 

She proceeded to tell me about her awesome roommate and a collection of friends, male and female, that she hung out with.  I tried to pay attention and not look anxious, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were being followed.  Marie told me she’d just gotten her results for the DNA kit I sent her and offered to show me on her phone.  I declined, distracted and more nervous by the second. 

Finally, just a couple blocks from my apartment I saw Scott entering Starbucks.  He nodded to acknowledge he saw me too, but headed in the door like he had no intention of being introduced.  I didn’t mention it to Marie, but I wasn’t so nervous after that.  I wasn’t sure if he was letting me know it had only been him following us or that he was watching out in case someone else did, but for whatever creepy reason, I felt safer.

At the apartment, she hugged Judy and moved straight away to admire the dinner we’d set out.  “Oh my god, did you make all this?  Look at the salads, are those pears?  And fondue.  I love fondue!  You wanna come back to college and be my roomy?  I really like the one I’ve got, but I’m sure she’d be happy to squeeze you in with us when she saw you cook.”

“I like you!” Judy said, “To be fair, your aunt did a lot of the chopping and prep before she left.”

“Oh, I’d smuggle her back in my duffle any day.”

We ate like it was Thanksgiving and then Marie and I cleared while Judy set up for dessert.

“Chocolate fondue!” Marie squealed like she was ten again.  “That’s it.  I’m staying here.  There must be some way to get my classes online.  I’m sure I’d learn better while eating chocolate.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” Judy asked.

I felt a warm contentment in addition to my chocolate buzz.  I’d worried that Marie wouldn’t like my new life and new friends, but I should have realized that if she could appreciate me when I’d had so little to offer, she could appreciate any situation I happened into now.

 

That night when we were getting ready for bed, Marie came and plopped on my bed saying, “So tell me about your complicated friend.”     

“Well, the first night we met there was a rainstorm and the power went out.  I invited him back here, and well…”

Her eyebrows went up, but not in a disapproving way.  “What’s his name again?”

“Scott.”

“And?”

“He was a really nice guy and amazing in bed, but he left without leaving a note or his number, so I was pretty upset for a while.”

“Sorry, but I take it he made that up to you?”

Even as an official adult, I didn’t think I could explain to my niece about finding Scott strapped to a bed or about kneeing him in a doorway when he made a pass, but I knew she’d be okay with the stranger parts of the evening.  So I told her about the DNA cultists and the fight where Scott jumped out of a window.

Then, when I thought she might ask for details I didn’t want to give, I surprised myself by saying, “Do you want to know something I didn’t tell anyone else about?”  And I told her about running away from the chocolate shop and ending up at a fitness club with Scott.

“You sure know how to pick ‘em, don’t you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re ex-husband was a fairly nice guy, but basically agoraphobic and selectively mute.  Within a couple weeks of hitting the Bay Area, you meet a really nice guy, except whenever you’re together you get attacked or chased and end up escaping through windows.”

“You think Lance was agoraphobic?”

She rolled her eyes.

“Have you ever heard anyone referred to as a wolf-boy or werewolf?”

“I assume you don’t mean in books or movies?”

“I thought it might be some new kind of slang.  You might have heard it around college.”

“Nope, I go to geek school, remember?  So what do you think it means?”

“I don’t know.  I think some people here might sort of believe in magic.  They talk about people as wizards, werewolves, water spirits, and so on.  I guess I was just hoping there was some other context I didn’t know about.  Anyway, Scott’s supposed to be a werewolf.”

“And when was the last full moon?”

“The night of the DNA cult’s party.”

“But you saw him, and he wasn’t a wolf.”  She closed her eyes and lay back on my bed.

“Yeah, I don’t think they mean it that literally.  One of the women in my book group deduced that the cat who might be the wizards’ familiar was actually a person, and I think she’s this bag lady I keep running into.” 

“Cool, so long as there aren’t any sparkly vampires, I’m happy to meet whatever the bay wants to throw at me.”  She didn’t even open her eyes.

 

Saturday

Saturday night, we met the whole book group outside Cirque Scientifique.

“Emma, this is my niece, Marie,” I said.   Emma was done up in a midnight blue skirt with sequins scattered across. 

She introduced me and Marie to a new book group member, Leah, who had a tattoo of wings across her shoulder blades and wore a leather jacket cut wide enough around the neck to show off that body art.  I thought she must be freezing, but I could see Marie look down at the sweater that covered her temporary dragonfly tonight.

Marie shrugged, shifted her sweater and pulled the neckline over to show and say, “I’m trying out ideas like this.  But I want to get something permanent as soon as I decide.  Everything I like has wings.  This one’s small, but I tried a dragon and a phoenix.  I also liked a luna moth I tried on my ankle.”

They went into a detailed discussion on the placement and particulars of body art, and pretty soon the whole book group had gathered, including Ruth from The Forge.  There were now twelve of us all together, thirteen if we included Marie.  Emma managed introductions around a squished and mutating circle, and then we all headed into the event.  The complimentary passes from my work didn’t appear to get Marie and me anything special.  We were all given maps to the various attractions.  There was a main tent with shows at six and eight.  We’d missed the six o’clock performance, so we went to smaller tents to pass the time. 

Our large group drifted as a semi-intact entity.  First we made giant bubbles with a device like a hula hope on pulleys, and then we watched a short demonstration where a clown enclosed small smoke filled bubbles within a larger bubble, used bubbles to form a cube at their center, and finally made a giant bubble over a circus dog.  There was a sign on the “Science of Bubble-ology,” but most of our group was moving on by the time I found it.

We passed a wagon with the usual popcorn and cotton candy.  “You want anything, Marie?”

“I’m old enough to buy my own, you know?”

“Where’s the fun in that?” I said.

“Okay, the three color cotton candy, then.”

I got her a huge nest of sugar in pink, blue, and yellow layers.  She let me steal part of each color, and I found out that cotton candy comes in flavors.  I’m not sure the yellow had any connection to the sour yellow lemons grown in nature, but I liked the slight tang to its sweetness.

The big show, when we got to it, wasn’t that exciting.  They had a pair of twin contortionists who were amazing, but I couldn’t help wondering how I’d feel if a child I knew wanted to do that.  My favorite act was a man and woman on a static trapeze who did a humorous interpretation of mitosis and cells reproducing.  Other than some costumes, it was the only “scientifique” part of the show.

Our group was among the last to leave the big tent, and the others were chatting and making plans when I saw Marlene for the first time all evening.  She waved me over, and I dragged Marie along with me.

“Hi Marlene.  This is my niece, Marie.  Marie this is Marlene, my friend, my boss, and the person who got us comp tickets for tonight.”

“Thanks, good to meet you,” Marie said.

“Nice meeting you.  Have you seen the science of psychics in the tent over here?  You don’t want to miss it.”

“Sure, why not.  Let me tell my friends.”

I dashed back to Judy and Emma not knowing if they’d want to join me or just accept that I was splitting off, but Emma said, “That sounds perfect!”  She herded the whole book group into the small tent beside us.  It had fun house mirrors on the walls inside and chairs set up in circles around a small central table with a crystal ball on top. 

My book group, my niece and I took up almost half the seats.  Marlene and Don were the only other people present, and I wondered why this part wasn’t better advertised, or if it had already ended for the evening and Marlene just didn’t know.

Don waved without meeting my eyes and made no effort to come over.  A chime began to sound, and those book group members who were still chatting took that as a cue to quiet down.  Then a small man with almost no hair entered through a curtained door at the back.  He walked to the center table with the crystal ball and stood silently.  Two very large men came through the same curtained opening and took positions at opposite sides of the tent.

The little man put his hands on the crystal ball, and as it began to glow, the other lights in the room dimmed.  He said, “Throughout history many claims have been made for the crystal ball, that it could show the past, the dead, or the future are but a few.  In the right hands, the correct crystal structure can channel the powers of the user, magnifying them a hundredfold.  Each crystal structure is attuned to only one person, and the role of the medium may be to sense who that person is.  This is what I will attempt tonight.

The little man stood with his hands on the crystal ball.  Its glow increased as he moved his fingers steadily, creating bars of light that reflected from the mirrors around the tent.  It was kind of pretty, but not very impressive as carnival shows went.  Then the medium started to chant a sound.

“Yeel, Yeel, Yeela Yeela , Celia, Celia.”

It sounded to me like he was chanting my name, but I wasn’t sure as first if it would sound that way to everyone else.  It was only when most of my book group was looking at me that I nodded, and going along with the show, I said, “I’m Celia.”

“Come forward, Celia.”  The little man spoke without looking at me, and I wondered if someone had been listening when Marlene called me over and they happened to catch my name for this stunt.  I wished they’d chosen Marlene instead.  It wasn’t that I had stage fright, but I had never liked being the center of attention.

Still, I walked forward, trying to be a good sport.  The man said, “Put your hands on the crystal.”

The moment I did so, he stared at my face and said in a hiss, “Think of your earliest memory.” 

I remembered falling from a tree when I was maybe three or four.  I wasn’t even sure if it was a real memory or just a story I remembered from hearing it told so many times.

The ball glowed more brightly for a moment, but then it began to fade. 

He said in a rush, “Think of the strangest thing that’s ever happened to you.”

That had to be the party where they’d trapped me in the DNA sculpture.  I could remember that vividly, but the ball still faded.

“Think of the most frightening strange thing that ever happened to you.”

 I had no idea what that would be if it wasn’t the same party or maybe the encounters with thugs before or after.  By this point I was wondering more about the show.  I’d assumed it would all be staged, but the bald man’s patter was barely keeping my attention, and I figured that and a dimming ball must be even less impressive for the audience.  I began to worry that the so-called medium actually believed in magic and expected whatever we were trying to work by magic alone.

In a quieter voice he said, “Think of the strangest thing you ever seemed to make happen?”

Suddenly, the whole thing seemed beyond absurd.  The crystal was almost completely dim, and I felt like it was rejecting me.  I removed my hands and tried to sound light hearted as I said, “I don’t think I’m the right person after all.”

Then the little man looked at Marlene, and something very strange happened.  Marlene came forward and grabbed my hand.  In a fierce whisper she said, “Whose DNA was in your test kit?”

I guess I glanced at Marie before I’d consciously processed the question, because Marlene was walking back to collect her as I realized she meant the free test kits we’d been given from ACT Gene.  If she was asking that now after the little man’s spiel about the crystal being attuned to only one person, did that imply they’d made this crystal ball based on something in my DNA test kit?  But the kits were supposed to be anonymous.  Then I remembered Marlene handing me mine from the top of the stack in her office.

It was crazy.  Marlene wouldn’t risk her business on a stunt like this, and I was pretty sure violating confidentiality that way would be majorly illegal, not just “off-license genetics”.  Yet there she was, dragging my niece up to the crystal ball.  Suddenly, I was very worried about what that crystal ball was meant to do.

“Don’t touch it!” My voice sounded sharp and loud in the quiet tent.  I realized there were no longer crowd sounds from outside, and I felt trapped and in danger.

The man who was meant to be leading the show, the medium as he called himself, was standing with his mouth open. 

Marlene took my arm even as she still held Marie’s.  “Don’t worry.  It’s all for the cause of science.  Go ahead, Marie, let’s see if this crystal ball with brighten for you.”

Marie looked at me, and it was clear she wasn’t going to do anything for the sake of science or the show.

I looked around to those still seated, just my book group and Don, and said, “Sorry.  I think the show is over for tonight.”

I tried to wrench my arm free, and suddenly Judy was there to help me, and Emma was by Marie’s side.  The other women were standing up, and I realized any one of them would be willing to help either me or Marie without any further explanation.

I guess Marlene realized it too, because she let go of us both. 

I reached into my purse, instinctively going for my cell phone, but the new one, the one only set to call Scott, came to my palm instead.

Then there was a cold breeze across the tent, and men dressed all in black and white rushed in from both the main entrance and the back curtain.

I didn’t see Al with them, but the older man who I’d taken to be Al’s uncle or father was there.  They closed in on Marie and me.

I didn’t know the disposable phone as well as the replacement for my old one, but I made my best guess without pulling it from my purse and hit the buttons I thought would autodial Scott.

Then one of the goons grabbed both of my arms and pulled them behind me with enough force to dislocate a shoulder.  Luckily, I wasn’t trying to fight it, so the worst I got was a possibly pulled muscle.  I looked to Marie, and she’d gone pale but looked more confused than in pain.

Marlene had not been grabbed and instead was rushing towards the guy who’d sicked the goons on us.  “What are you doing here?”

“We came to see if your crystal harmonic interpretation would work, and now we’re happy to be of service.”  He faced the goon holding Marie and said, “Get her hands pressed to that ball without letting your own skin make contact.”

The man overpowered Marie in an instant, and the ball lit up ten times as bright as it had when I first touched it.  Marie let out a gasp, like she’d been slapped or stung, and then her eyes began to tear.  “It’s hurting me,” she said.

“Well, I guess the experiment is not a complete loss, although you clearly have only a fraction of your aunt’s power,” the man in black said.

“What’s it doing to her?” Emma demanded.

As she stepped forward, the man noticed her for the first time, and a cold smile split his face.  “Why if it isn’t the Priestess of Neverland.  What religion are you pioneering this week?”

“We don’t name them or call them religions anymore, as I think you realize.  But I still know a thing or two about power, and I think you’re taking something that belongs to that child.  If you harm my sister, you harm us all.”

The man threw his head back.  “Don’t invoke that coven nonsense here.  You said you weren’t a religion, and surely, this girl wouldn’t count as yours anyway.  Had you even met her before tonight?”

“Two others joined tonight.  This girl has claim if I say she does.”  She turned to Marie and said softly, “Marie, can you trust me?”

Marie looked at me, and not trusting the other two factions in the room or knowing what to do myself, I nodded.

In a voice that belied her pale face and damp eyes, Marie said, “I trust my aunt, and she trusts you, so yes, I can trust you and I do.”

Now the man who had looked so smug moments before was clenching his jaw and looking at those who’d come with him.

Emma said, “Thank you, Marie.  Keep your hands in place until I tell you.  Book group, everyone come to me and Marie.”

“Stop them!” The leader of the men in black shouted.

Suddenly everyone was moving.  The book group women were closing in.  The men in black tried to block or pull them away.  I couldn’t do much because the guy holding me was really big and just kept hold of my arms as everyone around us shifted.  I thought about kicking back into his knee or stomping his foot, but I decided to wait for a critical moment when being free for a second might matter.  For now, I figured he wouldn’t interfere with anyone else if he was busy holding on to me.

There were a few moments of scuffle, and several book group women managed to grab onto Marie.  The guy holding her did nothing to stop them, but he still held Marie by the elbows, and her hands were still pressed to the glowing crystal ball.

Emma and Judy were both among the women who’d been struggling with the men in black, but they were both up close to me and Marie.  “Li Mei, grab my hand.  Ruth, grab onto Li Mei.”  As the two furthest out managed to grab hands despite the men restraining them, Emma shouted, “Everyone, connect to Marie now!”

I decided to reach first and only stomp on the guy holding me if he wouldn’t let me touch Emma.  Conveniently, he let me reach out to Emma, but just as I touched her, I saw Marlene give him a nod as she herself lunged for the crystal ball.

Then everything happened in a flash.  As the book group connected there was a crackle of static on the hairs of my arms.  Something like lightening shot straight up from the crystal ball.  Emma yelled, “Marie, let go!”  Then the lights went out, and the tent roof burst into flame.

By the orange fire light, I saw Marlene grab the crystal ball and run for the curtained exit.  She plowed through Ron who seemed surprised but turned to follow her.  Then suddenly I was sideways as the guy holding my arms scooped me up and ran, aiming me head first, towards the red curtain.

As we rushed out, sirens suddenly came on, and I emerged into a world of flashing blue and red lights with a fire engine, at least one cop car, and utility workers in orange vests.  Sideways, in the flashing lights, I could have sworn Scott was one of the workers in orange. 

I was thrown into a van and scrambled to throw myself back out.  The big guy who’d thrown me now had something in his hand.  He struck me over the head as he jumped in beside me.

 

Sunday

Morning seemed much too soon as I woke with a headache and an awful taste in my mouth.  My left arm was pinned under me, and as I shifted I realized my wrists were taped together.

Then I remembered everything and opened my eyes to find Marlene arguing into her cell phone and Don sitting across from me rocking back and forth with his eyes closed.  I was lying on a scratchy sofa in what looked like a nice hotel room.  I wondered what would happen if I screamed.

Marlene was saying, “I need a new crystal by tomorrow.  I’m willing to pick it up myself, but I need you to run the sample right away.”  After a pause she said calmly, “I’ll pay for the part of the chip you can’t use.  What will it cost me to get it tomorrow?”  Then again, “Your technology can handle this in a matter of hours.  I know, I helped developed half of it.  Now I’m telling you, get the people and materials you need and do this right away.”  Finally she said, “That will do,” and she hung up.

When Marlene looked at me, she smiled.  “Sorry about all this, Celia.  I really didn’t mean to get you involved in the weird stuff, but you showed such promise.”  She still looked impeccable in heals, dark skirt and jacket.

Don opened his eyes and said, “Are you all right?”  The polo shirt he wore had sweat marks under his pits, and the laces on his sneakers were untied.

I started to shake my head, but a lump near the top of my forehead was tender where it rubbed on the sofa, so I said, “Not really.”

“I’m so sorry.  The idea was to make things simpler for you, by taking away power you didn’t know how to use.”

“Don.  She’s safer if she doesn’t know.”  Marlene’s voice was smooth and calm.

“What does it matter?  You think she won’t report being kidnapped?”

“She didn’t report the wizards shooting up her chocolate shop.  She must have something to hide.”

“We’re not like them.”

“Just hush.  Celia, you really don’t want to get involved in this.  Cooperate through tomorrow, and I’ll let you leave with a generous severance and a glowing recommendation.  BioSign is being bought out anyway, so it won’t reflect badly on you.”

“What?” Don practically whined.  “You didn’t say anything about selling the company.”

“Don’t worry, Don.”  Celia spoke as if he was too stupid to understand.  “It’s all a shell game, and we’ll keep the essential pieces together.  Now why don’t you go program something or do whatever you do with the rest of your time online.”

Don shuffled away without looking at either of us.  I heard him banging around in another room.

Marlene started doing something on her phone, and I didn’t know what I could say without making things worse.  Finally, I tried, “Marlene, I’m sure we can deal with this reasonably, whatever is going on, but is there a reason my hands should be taped together?”

“It’s just a few hours.  I’m doing all I can to get this fixed.”

“What’s going on?”

“What do you think is going on?”

“I have no idea.”

“That’s probably how it should be.”

She left the room.  The door was open to what I guessed was either an adjoining bedroom or a common area.  The sound of a cup being filled and a microwave running suggested the latter.

Trying to put together what I’d heard, it was clear Don knew more than me but was still just an employee.  The phone call suggested someone else was making a new crystal ball based on new data, probably a sample of my DNA taken while I was unconscious.  What I still didn’t know was how this related to BioSign and how BioSign might be related to wizards, werewolves, and whatever my book group had turned out to be.  Hadn’t one of the possible wizards said they weren’t really a coven?  Did that suggest they were something like witches?

With my head starting to throb and my arm all pins and needles, I lay very still and tried to decide on a test of sanity, or maybe reality.

I wondered again if screaming would help, but since I hadn’t heard any sounds other than Don and Marlene moving around, I figured we were either well sound proofed or didn’t have immediate neighbors.  Besides, I doubted screaming alone would be enough to get me out of this.

I think I dozed without meaning to, because there was bright light peeking around curtains when I woke.  I was still alone in the room, lying on the scratchy sofa.  The door to the next room was still ajar and I could hear someone typing, almost certainly Don.  It sounded so much like work.

The light reminded me that there was a window, and I’d twice seen Scott escape through windows.  I tried to sit up, and my head didn’t lurch the way I’d feared.  The pins and needles in my arm came back, but I figured circulation was good, all things considered.  I made my way to the window and saw the bay outside.  We were high in a building, so either an apartment or a hotel.  It was too far to jump.  There was no one to wave my taped hands at, and I doubted that would work anyway.  Maybe I could write something on the window, and someone searching would find me, but it seemed more likely to cause trouble with Marlene. 

Imagining a search made me think of Marie.  I hoped she’d been okay after the whole crystal ball episode.  I was sure Judy and Emma would look out for her, but I still didn’t know what the crystal had been designed to do or where the power to start the fire came from.  It had looked like lightening coming out of the ball, but that wasn’t really connected to rain or water, so I rationalized it hadn’t been my doing.  If the ball was some sort of weapon and they’d meant to attune it to me, then there must be a reason.  Would I somehow create a stronger beam, or had that been a reaction to our whole book group reaching out together?  If I knew why Emma hadn’t wanted Marie to let go until everyone was connected, I thought I’d understand a lot more of what was going on.  It might help if I could figure out a plan before Marlene got a hold of the new crystal that she thought would be attuned to me.

I looked around for my purse, but it was nowhere to be seen.  A phone wasn’t going to get me out of this one.  That left Marlene or Don. 

I made my way out of the room with the sofa and found it was part of a pretty nice suite.  Don was at a dining table, eating a pop tart and playing some game on his computer.  Marlene was in an armchair and looked like she’d been napping.

“I just needed to use the bathroom,” I said.

“Okay.  It’s right there,” Marlene nodded to the door I’d already guessed.

I went and did what was necessary.  It was incredibly difficult with my hands taped together, but I wasn’t going to bother complaining.  Not finding any potential escape options or phones in the bathroom, I went to sit on a less scratchy sofa, in the living room.

“So what was the crystal ball supposed to do?” I asked.

No one answered.  Don typed faster.

“Not much longer,” Marlene said.

I sat back on the sofa, hoping I’d learn something by watching them, but I just fell asleep again. 

I dreamed about Scott and the strange colors when we made love.  I dreamed about him rescuing me by leaping through a wall of flame, and then I dreamed about the crystal ball making a wall of flame.  I saw a city on fire, and I saw the crosswalk guys on the yellow boxes burning and melting, so I knew I was dreaming about Emeryville.

I woke to hear Marlene answer her phone.  “We’re on our way.”  Putting it in her purse, she said, “Don, get the thing.”

I watched Don disappear into what must be a bedroom, and the first thing I saw coming back out was a plunger.  Immediately after, I was facing a doorway full of hate/love for any anglophile who’d watched enough Dr. Who.  I knew that robot’s lines, and in a metallic tone I said, “Exterminate, exterminate!” and laughed until tears leaked out of my eyes.  It was one thing too many.  They could call themselves wizards or werewolves or covens, but when your kidnapper wheeled in a homemade Dalek, something had to give.

I couldn’t stop laughing as Marlene cried out, “What is it with this thing?  Am I the only person in the world who’s never heard of this show?”

By then Don had pushed the Dalek all the way into the room, and he stepped around the side nearest to me, where Marlene couldn’t see him.  He said, “You watch Dr. Who?”

Between my giggles I told him, “I learned to knit trying to make one of those twelve foot long scarves.”

“Me too,” he said, and started to laugh as well.

Marlene walked around to where she could see us both and gave a stern shake of her head as if we were both naughty children.  Then she said very calmly, “Help me with this.”

Don stopped laughing and so did I.

Marlene and Don lifted the dome from the top of the Dalek.  Then they lifted the huge middle section up and over a small chair hidden inside.  It was a blue plastic chair like a grade school student might sit in, and the back had been partly cut off to make it lower.  The chair was bolted to a wooden base with wheels and a hole where feet could stick through and make the prop move.  I could see now that the upper parts were just wooden frames covered with shiny plastic sheets.  But the plastic looked like it had been shaped with a heat gun, and the outside had looked good enough for a British TV prop at first glance. 

“Did you make that?” I asked Don.

He nodded shyly.

“That’s amazing.”

“Thanks.”

Marlene said, “Lucky day, fan girl, you get to ride in it.”  She waved with her hand for me to sit in the Dalek chair, and I realized this was how they were going to smuggle me out of the hotel.

Not having any better ideas, I walked over and sat in the little blue chair.  Marlene brought a roll of duct tape and taped my ankles to the chair legs with my feet up on the wooden platform so I wouldn’t be able to kick through the hole to make the Dalek move.  Then she put a strip of tape across my mouth.

“Is this really necessary?” Don asked.

“Definitely.  She’s upset everyone’s plans every step of the way.  Even if she’s cooperated so far today, that doesn’t mean she won’t try something if she gets the chance.  Come on.”

They lifted the other two sections of the costume to cover me, and I was trapped inside a Dalek recreation.  A piece of paper had been taped inside where I presumed the operator would have seen out when this was used as a costume.  There wasn’t any tape holding my body to the chair above my knees, so I thought I might be able to stand quickly and head but the top section off.  I wasn’t sure how heavy it was or if more than gravity held it down, but it was something to keep in mind if sounds suggested we were passing through a suitably public place.

I listened as Marlene and Don moved around the room, presumably gathering their belongings.  Then I felt the structure around me move, and I made my first ride as a Dalek.  I could see industrial carpet pass under the wheels, then we traveled down in an elevator.  When I was rolled out onto concrete, I guessed we were in a garage and not a public lobby where popping out of a Dalek with duct tapes across my mouth might draw useful attention.

Soon I heard heavy van doors open and some sort of ramp being maneuvered into place.  With a few stalls and shoves, my Dalek and I were wheeled up and in.  I think the Dalek was held steady in the van by bungee cords or something, but there was nothing but the tape on my legs holding me in place as the van bumped and curved along.  Every muscle in my legs and back was sore by the time we stopped, but I had no idea whether we’d driven twenty minutes or two hours.

I heard the van doors open and the ramp being shifted back into place.  Then I bumped and took a fast ride down with a tip sideways that ran me into the wood frame on one side.

“Careful,” I heard Marlene say.

“You could help,” Ron replied.

“Take her over to the Steve Jobs Gazebo and wait for the others.”

I felt myself rolled in bursts and starts down a concrete path.  I could sometimes see the edges of the path through the foot hole in the floor, so I guessed Ron was struggling by himself to move this bulky prop down a narrow path.  I had no idea where we were or why we’d be going to a gazebo.  I thought I should be frightened, but being trapped inside a Dalek made it hard to take my situation seriously, and I was curious to see what would happen.

What happened was Don parked me in a gazebo.  He took the top dome off from over my head and removed the tape in one fast rip from my mouth.

“Ouch.”  I raised my taped together hands to pat my face.

“Sorry.  At least you’re not a hairy person.  I suspect Marlene would have left the tape on, but she’s not here to tell me what to do right now.”

“I don’t suppose you want to untape the rest?”

He shook his head.  “They want you to stay in the Dalek.  It’s part of their plan to make this look like we’re filming some fan vid for YouTube or something.  They figure that lets them operate in the open no matter how weird things get.”

 “What’s really going on?”

“The less you know, the better, truly.”

“I’d feel better knowing.”

“No, you probably wouldn’t.  Just get yourself through this without a fuss, and maybe they can leave you alone afterward.” 

I wondered who he meant by “they” and if he’d seen himself as one of them until the fire or possibly until I recognized his Dalek, but I wanted to play on his sympathies while I had them.  “Really?  You don’t think they’ll do anything to keep me from telling?”

“Marlene has something with her non-disclosure agreement, and well, we have ways of discouraging anyone from talking.”

The use of “we” was not encouraging.  “Why me?  Why would anyone try to kidnap me or send thugs or guys with guns after me?”

“We didn’t have anything to do with the guns.  That’s the wizards who keep trying to get you for their own interpretations.  But yeah, things got rough at the tent.  I argued for a covert DNA sample from the start, but Marlene assumed you’d use the kit she gave you, even checked some obvious markers to confirm it was you.  Like that chocolate one we found.  The sample had that, and it’s rare and seems to correlate with power.  Best thing we found for ourselves in all our time as BioSign.”  He shook his head.  “But that other girl, she’s your niece?  She’s similar enough that they thought it was your DNA for the first crystal.”

“What are the crystals supposed to do?”

“They just take your first burst of power.  It won’t hurt, and most likely you would have wasted it or caused trouble with it otherwise.  So really, they’re sort of doing you a favor.”

“They set up that whole circus scene and now this to do me a favor?”

“Well, they have a use for the power once they trap it.  It’s all about profit, just like any business.  I’m just saying most of us wouldn’t have gone along with it if we thought it would cause you any harm.  This whole situation,” he waved around at the gazebo, “Was never part of the plan.”

“What are they planning to use it for?”

“That, I shouldn’t tell you.”

“But if it’s not going to do me any harm, then wouldn’t it be better to have my cooperation?”

“The thing is, most people once they find out they have power, they want to keep it.  Most often, they waste it or someone else channels it whenever it first breaks through.  I don’t know how you kept hold of yours so long, but anyone can tell you’re ready to burst.”

“So they hoped to get it into the crystal ball at the circus without me realizing I’d lost anything?”

“Yeah.”  Don smiled and his shoulders relaxed for the first time in our whole conversation.  He was clearly pleased that I understood, and under other circumstances, I wouldn’t have pushed a guy at a moment like that.  But ridiculous as the situation was with me sitting in a Dalek in a gazebo, I was still being held prisoner for reasons I didn’t fully understand.

“Don, I think I’d do much better at letting this go and getting on with the rest of my life if I knew what they wanted the power for.”

“If I tell you the details, then you become a liability.  Suffice it to say, Emeryville is a hot spot for this kind of energy, and the sort of power you have could crack it open, releasing that all at once.  But if it’s contained and controlled, that power could be used to make things go the way the board wants for several years, at least.”

“What, just by wishing?”

He laughed through his nose.  “No, that’s how the amateurs start.  The wizards try to channel their desires through rituals and whatnot.  But just as technology may let us understand the genetics behind this power eventually, a decent technomage should be able to constrain the magic once it’s in a fixed matrix, like the crystal.”

“Should be able to?”

“What we’re trying here is cutting edge.  Getting untapped power like yours and a hot spot like Emeryville together is rare enough not to have happened in the last few years, since the technology caught up.”

“So you can tell me all this, but not what these technomages want to use the power for?”

“Well, I figure if you’re into Dr. Who, you can handle knowing this much.  I’d want to know.  I mean, I have the coolest job in the world, and I never get to tell anyone.  Besides, if you told, who would believe you?  But the details, that’s all corporate strategy and business stuff.  It might be hard for regular business people to counter the use of power, but they could make things messy, like the wizards did with that werewolf and you.”

He said it so casually, like everyone chatted to their Dalek about their work with technomages and the daily inconveniences of wizards and werewolves.

“Don, what happened to your power?”

“Oh, a technomage found me in a start up and used me in a hack job.  I would have thought I was just a hotshot programmer if I hadn’t been recruited into this.”

“Did you ever make weird stuff happen before that?  Like stuff out of cartoons or rainstorms or stuff?”

“Nah, rainstorms require a big power, maybe one in a million, and it takes years to control stuff like that.  I just kept getting the high score on games I hardly knew.  I thought I was naturally talented with electronic systems.  That led me to programming, and maybe it gave me a head start at first.  But I’m pretty good now, even without real power to channel.  You see?  You’ll be fine, like me.  Can you forgive me now?”

I wanted to.  For a guy who didn’t seem to have much charisma, he sure made me want to let him off the hook.  I wondered if there was some residual magic to that.  Whatever I felt, I fought it and said, “I’d forgive you everything if you’d just let me go.”

He looked crushed, and then he frowned.  “I thought after all this, you’d understand, but you’re just thinking about yourself.”  He looked across the park to what I guessed was the van we’d arrived in. There was an old Cadillac with blacked out windows pulled up behind it, and Marlene was leaning in at the passenger window to talk with someone.  “Just sit tight for another half hour and you’ll be safe and get a nice severance package to boot.  All I wanted was to make things right.”  He wandered around the gazebo kicking his feet at the ground and mumbling, “Why are people always so mean?  Just a little compromise, a little sharing, and everyone could be happy.  But it never works out right…”

By then, Marlene was walking towards us with what looked like a golf bag.

Don’s words about people being mean instead of sharing and making everyone happy ran through my head as Marlene pulled a tripod out of the bag.  She cast a dismissive glance at Don, who was muttering under his breath as he paced around the outside of the gazebo.  With cool confidence, she adjusted the tripod to its highest setting and checked all the leg joints.  Then she screwed on a metal bowl attachment and gently rested a new crystal ball in the bowl.

“Marlene,” I asked.  “What happened with Lance?  Did you take his power without him knowing?  Was my whole marriage a trap?  A storage system?”

She didn’t even look at me.  She just called out, “Don, come act like you’re filming.”

There was no sign of anyone in the park aside from the three of us and whoever watched from the Cadillac with the darkened windows.  I guessed those were other business partners or technomages, or both.

Don stood still and stopped mumbling as he pulled out his cell phone and held it as if he was filming.  His words about making everyone happy combined in my mind with what he’d said before about Emeryville being a hot spot that could crack wide open if the power wasn’t channeled into the crystal.

Marlene walked behind me and reached over my shoulders to pull my taped hands out of the Dalek and onto the ball.  With my wrists still taped, my palms would barely form a “V” wide enough to hold the ball, but the moment I made contact it glowed and warmed.  My hands must have been freezing, because that warmth felt so good.  It pulled through my fingers and arms and shoulders, relaxing and heating me.  It softened the tape on my wrists and legs so it fell away to the ground.  Then I started to see colors and whatever had happened when Scott and I made love, the part with sight that I’d never known before, it was ready to happen again, but this time, it wasn’t going to happen inside of me.  I could feel the magic.  I believed in magic.  There were no doubts left in my mind.

It was bigger than me, and it wanted to escape.  It wanted to break free, but it was attracted to the structures in the crystal.  I saw them through the magic as tiny, branching, color-coded paths, paths that might do something, but I didn’t know what.

Something in the magic was suspicious.  The paths were too perfect, something in the magic, or maybe something that was once part of me, knew it was a trap.  It knew about people being mean and selfish, but it also knew about sharing and making things better.  The possibilities were very close together, a matter of choosing correctly, but that was the tricky part.  Each choice was complex.  This crystal looked complex, but all the paths were like fractals, tiny repetitions of some larger closed pattern.  They needed to be open ended, like the paths in a living organism, the paths that could change in a fraction of a second as molecules or something smaller combined and divided.  The crystal was a closed version of me.  Whoever made it, meant to trap the power inside and then let someone similar to me connect new paths that led outward to other possibilities, to only one possibility at a time.

What they’d overlooked was that I was the perfect connection for that crystal.  It was based on my DNA.  As the crystal warmed, the skin on my hands burned and sealed itself on.  I could smell the burnt flesh and even feel the pain, but it was part of something small that I’d been trapped in before.  I was part of the magic now, and if we kept both the ball and my human body together, we could control all the power that had built up in this place.

Someone was tugging at my arms.  It was Marlene, still standing behind me, still touching my arms.  I could feel her.

I opened my eyes.  I could see Don, phone still positioned as if to film, but he wasn’t looking at the screen.  He was looking at me.   “Don’t.  You think you can control it, but you can’t.”

I knew he meant well, but I felt the control.  Maybe the crystal made it easier, but I was part of the power, and I could sense channels to follow.  What would be best?  I could fix the ozone layer or sequester carbon dioxide.  But if I did it by wanting, I could almost see the wrong paths the power might follow.  If the carbon dioxide was sequestered in the ocean, the water would become acidic so fast that the creatures living there would die.  If levels in the air decreased suddenly, those who said emissions didn’t matter would win.  Human’s would produce greenhouse gases even faster, and I wouldn’t be here to fix it next time.

My head hurt.  I felt like I might burst and remembered Don saying something about that.  I’d thought it was a figure of speech, but what if I really could burst open right here in this Dalek?  I needed to keep track of my human part, even the burnt hands that now scorched like fire.

If the human part of me looked at the ball, the light was blinding.  If the rest of me looked farther, I could see humans converging on this point.  I could use the power to make them go away, but as I saw more and more possibilities, they almost all involved someone getting hurt.

Then two more cars were parking out by the van.  The Cadillac tried to drive away, but a pickup truck pulled in sideways across the road, blocking it.

Men in black and white poured out of the two new cars and the pickup truck.  They streamed across the grass and formed a circle around the gazebo.  They began to chant, “The resonance of DNA contains the magic…”

The magic in me laughed.  Their ritual of control barely brushed the nexus of possibilities I felt growing in front of me.

Then a motorcycle pulled up to where the truck blocked the road.  The front figure looked familiar.  As he pulled away a helmet, I saw it was Scott.  For a moment I was more human than magic and the power around me wavered.  It started to rain.  Scott stood aside as the figure behind him jumped off of the motorcycle.  Scott pulled out an umbrella.  He held it mostly over her, a small woman with muscular arms who pulled off her helmet to reveal short gray hair and a face wrinkled but still strong.

She set her helmet on the bike seat and began walking towards me.  Scott followed with the umbrella.

Someone in the wizards circle said, “If that’s the wolf boy, could that be the brood mother?”

“Defense now,” said another man in black, and half the men in the circle pulled out guns, alternating so that every other man remained chanting.

“Put those away, are you fools?”  The old woman’s voice boomed across the lawn like that of a 200 pound , male truck driver.  It was low and scratchy, and it attracted the power around me almost as much as the crystal did.

I clung to the power, but through it felt a revulsion for the guns and a way to melt a little piece inside so they couldn’t fire.  That seemed like a good idea, so I wished it so, but in the moment it happened, I heard a bang.  One gun had backfired and there was blood all over the hand of the man who held it.  Other men with guns dropped theirs, some shaking their hands as if the guns had suddenly become too hot to touch.

“See there?” the old woman said, still walking forward under Scott’s umbrella.  “Go home before any more foolishness happens.”

No one moved to leave, and as the woman crossed the wizards’ circle, one man pulled out a knife and tried to stab her.  She ended up holding his knife hand by the wrist.  “Let it go,” she said, and then she was carrying the knife with her, blade down.  The man who’d attacked her held his place in the circle and let her pass, followed by Scott, still carrying the umbrella. 

I took a breath, decided the rain was silly, and it stopped.  Scott closed the umbrella.

“Step aside, son.”  The woman tapped Don on the shoulder as she followed the ramp up to the gazebo.

“Who are you?” he asked, even as he did what she said.

“Brood mother is close enough.”  Then she shook her head toward me and Marlene.  “What have you done?”

Marlene made a grab for the ball, but a hiss as her finger touched told me it was too hot to handle, even before I smelled the hint of smoke and heard Marlene gasp.

The brood mother looked at my hands, not burned but somehow sealed as if they’d melted into the ball.  Then she looked over my head to Marlene, “You based it on her DNA.  How clever you all think you are.”

The old woman moved to stand right in front of me and held out her hands so they hovered less than an inch above the ball.  Scott moved to the opposite side of the entry arch from Don, placing his back to the support beam so he could see everyone both in and out of the gazebo.

“And you,” she looked me in the eye.  “You aren’t as new to this as they thought.”

“But I—” I meant to say I hadn’t fully believed in magic until today, but I knew from the way I’d just turned the rain off, that some part of me had been learning, even practicing, whether I fully believed or not.

“You can’t control this.  No one can.”

“I know.  But it wants to go someplace, and I want to it go someplace good.”

Marlene made another grab for the ball, this time her hands were wrapped in cloth of some kind.  The cloth caught on fire and she shook her hands free.  The heat of the flames swept my face, but I could tell it didn’t burn me.  The brood mother stepped back, but wasn’t hurt either.

Marlene swore, but then I heard her dialing her phone, so I guessed her hands weren’t too badly hurt.

Don let out a squeak, and I looked down to see the plastic on the front of the Dalek was blackened just below my arms.  “Battle scars,” I said mostly to Don, but it helped me understand the fire was real.

My arms hadn’t felt a thing.  When I closed my eyes, I could feel the magic enveloping them.  It needed to take all of me to figure out the best paths to follow.  I realized the only way to control it meant losing my human self.  It could find in me the paths it needed to follow.

“What do you want when you say the power should go someplace good?”  I heard the brood mother’s voice, as if from a distance, asking.  Within the part of me that was magic, I felt the question as something much more complex. 

I saw why my ideas to stop global warming or save the ozone layer couldn’t work.  I was trying to specify an outcome, but there were too many branches along the way to those goals.  The magic couldn’t directly create outcomes.  My best hope was to give it good intentions and whatever understanding I had.  I think I spoke aloud, or at least someplace where the brood mother could hear me, “I think I need to mean well, to not want anything for myself or anything specific.  If I want for people to be less selfish and try to understand and make better choices, will that work?”

“Do you believe you’re a good person?” she asked back.

“Not good enough.”

“Do you believe most people could choose to make things better?”

“Do good intentions count?”

“They may have to.  You can’t hold this much longer.  Want with what’s best of you, and then try to let it happen slowly.”

The wanting seemed natural.  The power I held seemed to be one big mass of wanting.  I tried to want with the best of myself, but it was slippery to hold onto what that was: helping children at The Forge, trying to help the homeless woman when she was being beaten up or when I gave her my hot chocolate, hoping that Scott was okay after he jumped through the window, wondering if Marie and my book group were safe after what happened at the circus.  Those were the first, concrete good that I found in myself, but the power was so much bigger than that.  I thought about global climate change, with all the problematic fixes I’d found earlier.  Any real solution would have to involve lots of people thinking about long term effects, making individual efforts to save energy or to choose cleaner alternatives.  Real solutions to keeping people safe and fed would come if lots of people did just a little more with their best intentions.  Then I realized, that would be a way to find the best in many people, or people as a group.  We needed to think more about others and long term consequences.  We needed to act on our best understanding and try to work together.  I didn’t need to come up with a profound use for the magic.  I could give a boost to all the good intentions that people were waiting to put into action.

I heard the brood mother say, “Whatever you’re doing, the power here is almost gone.  If you want to live, you have to remember you’re human now.  Think about your hands and even if it hurts, you have to want them back and separate from the crystal.”

I tried to hear her voice and know she was standing in front of me.  Being human sounded like something I’d want, but I could barely remember what having someone “in front of me” would mean.  I thought about my hands, how they’d burned for a moment and melted into the ball.  I thought about when it was only a pleasant warmth against my cold hands and hoped that releasing my hands could be as easy.  Then I felt the warmth, the raw skin that was probably my palms releasing.  I knew the crystal ball was in front of me, and I felt Marlene and all the Wizards in the circle tense to grab it when I let go.  Then before the magic ran all the way out, I saw the crystal turn to water and run from my hands and down the tripod.

My eyes were suddenly open.  I saw the puddle.  The brood mother looked at me and winked.  Don’s mouth opened in shock.  Scott said, “Careful, this isn’t over yet.”

The Cadillac revved its engine and drove out onto the grass, trying to get around the pickup truck.  A wizard yelled, “Defense two!” and the half of the men who hadn’t drawn guns before did now.  The brood mother said to Scott “stay” and then was over the railing and running for the woods without a shot being fired.

“Focus on the mages,” the shouting wizard said.  Half the men with guns started shooting at the Cadillac. 

The rest surrounded Marlene and Don.  Scott and I were sort of caught in the middle of that, but Scott said, “You know there are police on the way?”

The leader, who wasn’t Al or the older man I’d met before just shouted, “Search them!”

There were a couple more gun shots out by the Cadillac.  The wizards near the gazebo frisked Don and Marlene, but Scott was facing down their leader and said, “Let us leave, and you don’t have to fight us today.”

The leader looked thoughtful for a moment, and then nodded.  I couldn’t believe it. 

I scrambled to stand on the chair in the Dalek, but without having the top section removed, there was no easy way out.  Scott stepped forward awkwardly reaching under my arms and said, “Jump.”

I did, and then we were running toward his motorcycle. 

“Let those two go,” the lead wizard shouted, and soon we were climbing onto the motorcycle.  Scott fastened the brood mother’s helmet on my head and said, “You aren’t going to pass out or anything?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then hold on.”

“What about the brood mother?”

He gave a short laugh, “Don’t worry about that one.”

He revved the motorcycle, and we were off.  I held on around his waist and leaned against his flannel shirt, remembering the jacket he’d left me the last time I saw him.

“Aren’t you cold?”  I shouted to be heard over the road noise.

“Not now,” he said.

I realized I wasn’t cold either.  It felt so good to be with him and be safe.  Then I wondered for a moment, if the werewolves were a faction in whatever just happened, was I safe?  How could I know Scott wasn’t just kidnapping me for another side?  On a gut level, I wanted to trust him.  And pressed up close behind him on a motorcycle, I was overwhelmingly attracted to him.  But what did I really know about this guy?  What was a brood mother, and aside from the quick way she’d grabbed a knife, how did she end up in the gazebo guiding me through my confrontation with magic?

There were so many questions swirling in my head that all I could hope was to make it safely home.  I still held onto Scott and enjoyed the feel of my arms wrapped around him, but part of me was uncertain until we stopped in front of my apartment.

“Do you want me to walk you up?”

I slid awkwardly off the bike and removed the helmet.  Then I heard Marie shout from a window above, “Aunt Celia! You’re back,” and she turned to run down and greet me.

I turned back to Scott, “No, I don’t think that’s necessary.  Thanks for bringing me home.”

He looked at me as if he knew what I really meant, that for a while there I wasn’t sure if I could trust him.  He said, “I’ll do my best to make sure you’re safe.  See you Saturday.”

There was no question of a kiss as my niece flew out the front door, closely followed by Judy, who was puffing but smiling, and Emma, who looked preternaturally calm.

Scott took the helmet from my hand and drove away.

My niece caught me in a hug around the neck and then dragged me back to the apartment.    Judy patted my back and said she knew I’d be home for dinner.  Emma just nodded as if she really had known, and soon we were all seated at the dining table enjoying another meal of cheese fondue to be followed by chocolate fondue, and I couldn’t help imagining making the same for Scott the next Saturday.  It really was delicious, happy food.

“Now that your niece has proven herself a part of the book group, I’ve been filling her in on the magic of connectivity.”

“Maybe someone should have filled me in.”

Emma smiled, “You think I understood before we had to save Marie?”

“So what would have happened without the book group?”

“Probably, she would have just lost what power she had, but who knows?  It wasn’t designed for her.  I think the question of the day is, what happened to you?”

I dipped a grape in cheese and ate it while they waited.  It was a really good grape.  “I guess I broke the new crystal and sent the built up energy where it will hopefully do some good but at least won’t tempt anyone to try this again, at least not here.”

“You figured that out and channeled it all by yourself?”

“No, I had some help from a couple of friends and someone called the brood mother.”

“The what?” Judy asked.

I tried to guess from Emma’s face if she already knew, but she seemed to be taking it all in.  “I think she’s important with the werewolves.  I think I also lost my job.”

“If you want to continue in biotech, I have some connections,” Emma offered.

“Something free of technomages?”

“That’s sort of a self-declared label, so it’s hard to promise.  Now that you know genetics and magic might be connected, wouldn’t you consider working for someone you trusted?”

“I don’t think I trust anyone around here.”

“I’m hurt.”  Emma put her hand to her chest.

“Oh.  I might be willing to think about it then.”

“Let me know when you want to talk.”

“Maybe I’ll switch majors to biotech or genetics or something,” Marie said.  The conversation spun in a whole new direction as we enjoyed our cheese and chocolate.

 

Saturday

Marie had gone back to her mother for Christmas.  Judy was visiting friends from her cat group and spending the holidays at some animal shelter community service event.  I’d had a week with no work, just a cryptic message from Marlene about the “full power” behind my non-disclosure agreement and a more bureaucratic letter about my severance benefits.  It was a pretty nice severance package.

When I’d invited Scott for dinner tonight, I hadn’t thought about how close it would be to Christmas, and how awkward the issue of presents might be.  In the end, I’d gone to a chocolate imports store and made up a collection of single source bars from around the world.

When I opened the door for Scott, he stood holding a gift box from Natalie’s with a big red and gold bow.  I started to laugh.

“What?  I haven’t even said anything yet.”

“Come see.”

He followed me to the living room where I gave him the gift bag I’d stuffed for him.  Then we both laughed. 

“Don said the DNA sequence we found for chocolate triggering brain activity correlated with magic stuff.  Do you think there could be anything to that?”

“Perhaps...” he raised an eyebrow. 

I knew in a heartbeat it could never be the same between us.  I’d given up my magic, but I knew about that world.  Scott would stay a part of it but never be able to speak openly.  If my marriage to Lance had been a trap that almost smothered me, could I really stand being close to Scott this way?

“Wait!” He grabbed my hand, a flash of panic in those green eyes, so close to mine right now.  “I don’t know what you think, but we called in utilities and police to rescue you.  We didn’t expect your boss to kidnap you.  Then we couldn’t find you until the wizards moved in, and I did bring you home and rearrange the utility covers to keep you safe, didn’t I?”

“You rearranged the crosswalk guys, to keep me safe?  Did I need keeping safe?”

“A bit,” he mumbled, looking at the floor, “but all involved understand now, the power has dissipated.  You have no more connection than any of us.”

“And you’ll never be able to tell me the rest, about you, the brood mother, chocolate.”

He raised my hand to his mouth and kissed it so lightly I could barely feel his lips.  “I’ve heard stories since I was little of my kind being lured by hot chocolate in South America.  Would you like me to tell you one?”

“You can tell me?”

“I have permission from the brood mother herself.  She seems to like you for some reason…  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  The new barista at Natalie’s wanted me to say hi to you.”

“I’m amazed you’d show your face in there.  Have they recovered from all the water damage I caused?”

“Only took a day of corporate effort.  But the new barista is part of something larger, I suspect.”

I gave into his hinting and teasing smile.  “And who and what would that be?”

“She’s an older woman, named Rachel.  A newly funded program at the opportunity center helped her find housing and a job at Natalie’s.  She said to tell you they treat her much better than her former employers did.”

“Oh my goodness, that’s the bag lady I gave my Starbucks chocolate to the night I met you!”

“I know,” he said.  “Do you understand the rest?”

“That she got a job, and housing?  That’s great.”

He shook his head.  “Sit down.”

I sat on the couch and he settled in right beside me.  From his pocket, he pulled a folded up newspaper.  First he handed me the local section with the headline, “Silicon Valley Business Leaders Fund New Education Initiative.”  Then he held up the real front page, “Historic Bipartisan Agreement in Congress.”

I shrugged.  “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be looking at.”

“You did this, or at least helped.  You sent the power that had collected here out with your best intentions to improve the world.  And it looks like it mostly worked.”

“You could read that into any headlines.”

“Do you read newspapers much?” he nudged me, and I felt warm all over.  “Anyway, the brood mother watches these things, and she says you did well.”

“That’s why you’re here and allowed to tell me about stuff?”

“I’d hoped to be here anyway, but it does make me less conflicted about seeing you.”

I knew then, from the careful way he held my hand or maybe the tilt of his head, that it would have been as hard for him to be dishonest with me as it would have been for me to carry on that way.  “And I tried not to wish anything selfish.”

He put his arm around my shoulders, and I had so many questions in that moment.  Instead I said, “Let’s eat!” and I led him to the table where I’d set up for cheese fondue and later . . . chocolate.

The End


End file.
